mellicious | Entries tagged with pictures

Weetabix posted an entry a few days ago including a picture taken in a Las Vegas bathroom, and I thought, "Hey! I have a bunch of pictures of bathrooms in Las Vegas!" I know that sounds kind of weird, but at TUSCon in 2004 I got fascinated by the themed bathrooms, and I remember taking pictures in a number of them. Only it was so long ago, apparently - c'mon, 2004! forever ago in internet time! - that I can only find one of them now. This is Paris, which was my favorite one anyway.

I mean, is that not terribly Parisian? (I've never even been to the real Paris, but, well, it seems very French!)

And I honestly can't even remember what the rest of them were now - I'm starting to think I dreamed the whole thing. But I had some computer issues in the intervening years (especially that whole little apartment-flooded-by-a-hurricane thing) and then there was the crash of Diary-X, too, so while I'm pretty sure they did in fact exist, I have no idea what became of them. One must've been the Luxor, because that's where we were staying, and I think maybe one was the Aladdin, which I seem to recall had a doorway shaped like a minaret. But I have no evidence of these things any more, apparently.

So I'll throw some more Vegas pictures at you just for fun. Here are some Vegas-at-Christmas pictures from 2007, that's appropriate for Holidailies!

Many places were quite tasteful, particularly considering it's Vegas we're talking about. This is the Forum Shops:

Outside at Caesar's:

This was the Tiffany store at the Bellagio:

Venetian:

TI (I titled this one "Christmas at the casino"):

This one is the Conservatory at the Bellagio, which also had somewhat cracked-out decor when we were there in the summer of 2004. I don't know what's up with that, exactly. (I don't think it seems as overwhelming in the pictures as I remember it being in real life. It was a LOT of decorations stuffed into a very small space.)

And we'll finish up with this picture, just because it's Vegas and I like it:

I think most people who are likely to read this know by now that my schedule is all crazy - staying up all night, sleeping during the day - but I took it to a new level ~~this~~yesterday morning by going to the car dealer and getting my oil changed and the tires rotated before I went to bed. It seemed like the best time to get it over with, but I don't think I'm going to be doing that much. It didn't bother me much at the time, but I've felt wonky all night. And I haven't gotten much studying done tonight. I couldn't get my brain to settle down and concentrate on the reading (I'm on Fetal Development at the moment) so I went and took pictures of jewelry instead. It's something I've been meaning to do so I figured if I couldn't read it was at least sort of productive.

People who sell jewelry - they're the ones who become jewelry-photography experts - always say to photograph your jewelry in daylight, but that's sort of hard to do when you're sleeping all day. I'm awake for some hours of daylight, of course, especially this time of year, but still, I never remember. So the other day when I saw somebody talking about photographing jewelry under an Ott-light, I paid attention. I have a couple of Ott-lights (which is a brand of daylight-spectrum lamps & bulbs) left over from quilting, so that seemed like something doable.

( Photo and explanation under the cut )

There will probably be some more jewelry posts later, so I can show you what else I've been up to. But right now I'm going to read a bit more and then go to bed.

Not the best picture of me ever, but you can see my new glasses AND the devil horns. Since I didn't end up going to the quilt show, I have to show them to somebody!

Wow, I had a really insane day. Just one thing after another. But a few things before I forget again:

CBS Sunday Morning did a piece on quilting last week - I meant to try to wake up for it and of course I forgot. Luckily somebody on the quilting group

calicocats posted the link - go here and then look for "Quilts for Sale" in the Top Videos (right now it looks like it's #2). I know Ricky Tims a bit - I've had dinner with him, back when I was an officer in the quilt guild, and I took that "Caveman Quilting" class of his that they talk about in that piece, too. He's a hoot, that's the best way I've come up with to describe him. Sort of a born showman, that type of person. Which is why he's the big star of the quilting industry - I mean, he's genuinely talented, absolutely, but he's also automatic entertainment rolled into the package.

I gave away the little quilt that I started in that class without getting a good picture of it, which is something I always kick myself about, but this is the bad one:

( cut for rather large picture )

(Note: I went back and cropped the picture to edit out as much of my mother's loveseat as possible. Gawd, that's a bad background for a picture!)

It was fun to do - and most of that is that hand-dyed fabric of his, too, which costs $25 a yard, no less. No wonder it's a billion-dollar industry.

I've been e-mailing back and forth with my sister all week. I don't know what the status is about doing that gift show in the fall - I suspect she hasn't found time to check into it yet. Her current thing is that she wants to do, I don't know, a catalog or something, and market other people's artwork as well as her own. I don't know about catalogs, but I actually think something along those lines could be her niche - after all, artists don't like selling any more than anybody else does, and possibly less. She was managing retail stores back before she got pregnant (over 17 years ago now!), and the only real jobs she's had since were in the gift-store business, so she does have a good bit of background in that sort of thing. If she'll just sell some of my stuff along with the rest of it, I'll be happy. (Hell, maybe she can sell my quilts for enough money that it'd be worth my while financially to make them! Stranger things have happened.)

Hey, I'm a published photographer... sorta. schmap.com asked if they could use one of my pictures in the latest update of their guide to New Orleans, so I said, sure, why not? You don't get money but you do get credit! Although I didn't use my real name, I used Mel. I figured to the extent I have a "reputation" as a photographer it's for all those pictures on flickr as "mellicious" - not for my real name. Anyway: go to this page and hover over the listing for Hotel Monteleone - a little slideshow comes up on the right, and my picture is in there. It's not exactly big fame, is it?

I seem to have picked up my quilting again, in a small way. About time, isn't it? I went to Office Depot tonight and bought a somewhat expensive lamp for the sewing room - it was too dark in there - so I guess I'm serious. (There's more about that over here, if you're interested.)

I need to put up some GuildWars screenshots, I haven't done any in ages. I have a baby paragon named Delilah who I've been bringing up in Nightfall - it was a good mindless thing to do while I was sick - and nobody has ever even seen the poor child, not even

columbina, and she turned level 20 tonight so she's not a baby any more! (I also have - this will make Col laugh - another necro in pre-searing. I like to play low-level characters when I'm tired, it's soothing!)

And I am ~~tried~~ tired now, I'm going to bed!

I finished defensive driving at last - I put off working on it too much this week (or just forgot about it half the time, really) and ended up spending most of the day on it today, at least off and on. I figured that I needed to finish before tomorrow, because I only paid for three-day shipping and it takes them a day to get it in the mail. I have to be done by Thanksgiving Day, actually - which means I have to turn it in before then. So I'm figuring it will be here Friday, which gives me a couple of spare days to get it down there to turn everything in. It was very boring, but hey, I made 100 on the test and at least it's over with.

I'm still working on getting pictures online, too - another thing that I'm ready to be done with. I'm getting them up faster than I did last year, I think, though. As I recall it was just about Thanksgiving before I finished last year. Flickr has made the process easier and of course it helps to have broadband, and I've gotten somewhat better at the process of getting the names on them, too.

columbina and I played GuildWars for a good while this afternoon, for the first time in weeks. We've both been busy, we both have new computers to get set up, all of that. Anyway, it was nice to play together. We played my baby monk (who is not such a baby any more, she is at level 17) and Hecuba, Col's elementalist who is playing in the same area. We did a mission in Kryta and then we took Celia to Elona, where she can get heroes, because the fact is, henchmen really suck. So yay, heroes.

Rob did go out - he went to the bookstore for a while and then went to see that Denzel Washington gangster movie, which he said was good. I wanted to stay home, the movies didn't especially appeal and it's nice to just stay home sometimes. We ate pancakes this morning, and drank coffee and had really, really good sex, which always brightens up the day, doesn't it? And then I alternated between GuildWars and getdefensive.com and downloading pictures for pretty much the rest of the day. And now I'm tired and I'm about to go to bed. And I have a whole week of work ahead, darnit. Friday afternoon off, I suppose, but still, a whole week. But there's not much I can do about that.

George cemetery
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

This seems very apropos right now.

Unveiling

In the cemetery
a mile away
from where we used to live,
my aunts and mother
my father and uncles lie
in two long rows,
almost the way
they used to sit around
the long planked table
at family dinners.
And walking beside
the graves today, down
one straight path
and up the next,
I don't feel sad, exactly,
just left out a bit,
as if they kept
from me the kind
of grown-up secret
they used to share
back then, something
I'm not quite ready yet
to learn.

(By the way, the tombstone in the picture belongs to a great-aunt - my grandmother's older sister. Note the dates.)

Spell with Flickr

(Found via Kathryn Cramer)

In'noshima quilt
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Pictures from the big quilt show are going up, slowly, for those of you who are interested. This is one of my favorites - it's a very large quilt - I'd estimate 8 feet by 12 feet.

First set of pictures is here - I think I'm dividing them into two sets but I don't have a URL for the other one yet since it hasn't been started!)

Current Location: home

TOGgers & their dragon masks
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

I posted that whole long GuildWars entry the other day and didn't include a picture - I consider that falling down on the job. (You would be better off clicking over to the big version of of this if you're really interested at all, because the small versions tend to be really muddy.) Anyway, this is some of our guild members in their dragon masks. My character is towards the right, with the red mask and the purple fringey thing and the tattoos.* Columbine is not in the picture because he thinks photo ops are boring, and he is usually quite right, but this one was not. This one was quite entertaining. I don't know if it was the masks making everybody a little goofy or what, but everything ended up like this. (Everybody around us was wanting to join our guild, since we were obviously the fun party people! but most of them weren't old enough. You have to be 25+, which makes us very much the minority around there.)

*Ritualists have tattoos. Lots of them. Tattoos are optional in some cases - like the monk in the bikini, there. For monks, the tattoos are a form of armor, and you can put them on and take them off - which is rather odd when you think too much about it, but that's how it works. (My monk has scalp tattoos but no others so far.) But with ritualists, the tattoos come with the character - very elaborate ones, around her waist, her feet and her hands. I'm just glad I didn't have to be there to get them! :)

Honestly, I'm trying to write an entry that's not about GuildWars but it's hard, that seems to be all that interests me terribly much these days. (I keep wondering what the people who come to look at my quilts on Flickr make of all those screenshots.) I am going to be forced to tear myself away from GW for two whole days this weekend, though - I am taking my mother up to Bryan to my aunt's. I am expecting this to be a little stressful, in that way that family things tend to be, but I imagine I will muddle through. My cousin is graduating (the pregnant one) and graduation is Saturday morning but we are excused from going because Mama really isn't up to the walking that would be required. (They have graduation on the A&M campus, which I think is really odd.) Anyway, we will be home relatively early Sunday, and Monday is a holiday so I should have a day and a half to catch up with the gaming. That's if Rob isn't demanding all my attention, of course!

Good lord, Sarah Michelle Gellar looks terrible.

More of the inevitable screenshots behind the cut...

( Read more... )

This is just so wrong.

Rima and her krewe, somewhere in North Kryta

So that is my elementalist Rima in the middle, with henchmen. The two burly gentlemen in the front are the warrior-types, Thom (aka Little Thom) and Stefan. The lady in brown is Reyna the Archer, and behind Rima is Alesia the Healer - not to be confused with Alessa the Warrior. I should have named my warrior something a little more different. (Not visible is Claude the Necromancer, who is probably off somewhere dead. It's how he spends most of his time.) The cat is named Sir George. He was originally just named George, but the White Mantle knighted him - I'm not joking, they really did - so we had to change it. (This was at the end of the D'Alessio Seaboard mission; they normally knight the leader of the party, and for some reason in this case the system decided that the leader of the party was George, not me. It was rather entertaining.)

I really intended to say more than this, but it is late and I am sleepy. Perhaps I will do a part 4A tomorrow.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: home
Current Music: GuildWars theme

I'm not putting this one behind the cut because I think it's pretty.

(For that matter, I like this picture so much that I'm putting the big(ger) version behind the cut!)

( Read more... )

(Part 4 will probably go up later, because I didn't get any of the newer Rima screenshots up last night.)

...behind the cut.

( Read more... )

I posted a bunch of Guildwars screenshots on Flickr last night, and Aet requested some explanation, so here goes. (Behind the cut...)

( Read more... )

Mel the Midget
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

This is just to show you that Mel the Monk is also a midget. When you set characters up, you can adjust their size - I meant to make her short, but not this short! She looks like a kid next to some of the big warriors. But I'm getting used to it.

(I also obsess about my characters' outfits, if you haven't figured that out already. I liked this one, but it's long-gone for one that protected better.)

guest appearance by my husband
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Rob loves this picture.

This is my quilt, which now has a binding - see the dark pink around the edge? Quilting 101: the traditional way to do a binding is to sew a doubled piece of fabric to the front, then pull it around to the back and whip it down by hand. And despite my avowed hatred for all forms of handwork, I have finished every quilt I have made this way. I don't know why. I guess just because I think it looks better that way. Anyway, in the picture it is just sewn to the front. It will be MUCH narrower than that when it's finished. Well under half an inch.

I missed the whole first half of the Texas-LSU game. I gather it was very close the whole way. I listened to most of the 2nd half on the radio (while I was sewing binding), then I went downstairs and watched the end with Mom and Art. I can't say I'm totally heartbroken. They were in the top 8, after all. Now I will have to root for LSU, I guess!

Columbine (who is such an LSU fan that he didn't know they played today, incidentally) sent me an invitation to play Guild Wars Factions this weekend, since he knew I have been interested in playing. They were having a preview-type thing. It was a good way to test it out, I think. Despite my subpar video card and my (horrors) incredibly slow dialup connection, it worked pretty well. He took me around tonight - in a virtual way - and gave me a tour. I have never played a "real" MMORPG before (Dofus and Kingdom of Loathing don't really count, I think) and it is quite a bit different. But I was starting to get the hang of it.

(I am retiring the Longhorn icon for the year. You shouldn't have to look at it for a while unless Texas happens to win the College World Series again - highly unlikely, I think. University of Texas Athletics has had a pretty good year, haven't they? but I don't think we can expect it to continue indefinitely.)

tobacco flowers
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

This is something I grew from seed. Most of my plants from seed just sort of barely hang on, if they live at all, but this one suddenly decided to bloom. (It really is tobacco, apparently - nicotiana, to be scientific about it.)

I'm still quilting my quilt. I got awfully close to finishing, but my neck started hurting so I quit. It's harder work than you'd think, pulling that thing back & forth. It'll only take me maybe an hour or so to finish the quilting, then I have to put on the binding. (I have to think about what I want to bind it with.)

In Dofus, I'm up to level 25, and I joined a guild. (I keep forgetting its name!) Level 20 or so seems to be the threshhold for joining guilds - you can join when you're below that, but when you get above 20, people start seeking you out. I started fighting scaraleafs - big dinosaur things - with big groups of people in the pay area, and you get 5000-10,000 experience points every time you win one of those fights. (Which is good, because they take ages, with all those people and monsters.) They really help you level up fast.

I'm watching Howl's Moving Castle. I can't say I really adore it. They changed too much from the book, and it annoys me because I liked the book. But on the other hand, I expected that, because everybody warned me.

I think we are going to see V for Vendetta tomorrow, so I will report back.

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Catchy Name Needed

Looking for a name since 2003

Entries tagged with pictures

Imaginary bathrooms?

Photos and Pandora

Happy halloween!

Quilts and stuff

This & that

Sunday at home

Linda Pastan, "Unveiling"

Toy of the day

Quilts

(no subject)

(no subject)

Col's characters

Oh, and one more picture

belatedly, part 4 of the screenshot extravaganza

Screenshots, part 3: Alessa the Warrior

Screenshot-y goodness, part 2

The Ranger

Mel the Midget

Guest appearance by Rob

Plants & quilts & Dofus & stuff