Planning ahead.

It is time once again to sign up for the upcoming semester. As with everything I do, this has had its fair share of potholes. (I MAY need to get my suspension repaired one of these days.)

The plan since, oh, last March/April has been that I would take Lilly to school with me. This was before Monday when we found out the official UVU policy is "No children in classrooms". Pothole.

I've been worried about how I was going to juggle a bookbag and a baby carrier and a baby bag, so, problem solved. So I go to log on to the school website last night to formulate a plan in preparation for being able to register today. Right at that exact moment, our internet service went out. Pothole. Since I had a something scheduled for just a few minutes later, I could not go somewhere else to get service. I called in the outage to our provider and waited till getting to school this morning to get online.

I arrived at school this morning, got settled in my normal Tuesday/Thursday morning spot and switch on my computer. And still can't get online. Pothole.

I panicked a bit, as classes tend to fill up very rapidly. I walked across campus towards the office where you go to troubleshoot the internet. I stopped on a whim and, suddenly, I was online. So I logged on and found to my surprise, that "someone" had signed me up for classes. Eighteen credit hours of them. Rather jarring Pothole.

Then I find a voicemail message, an email message, and an Instant Message all begging for forgiveness but she "couldn't resist". She was a little panicked about how January was all going to work out, so she solved the problem. This instead, in a classic panick transference, panicked me even more. So I get looking, I drop a couple of classes, I sign up for one, and I am Instant Messaging Paige the whole time. I get stuck trying to find the right Ethics and Values class for my major, when Paige IM's me and says, "hold on, I'll help." Suddenly I got logged out of the system. Probably because I had just logged on in American Fork. UVU does not allow multiple instances of a single user on the network.

Pothole.

In the end, I was able to get Paige to settle down, and I am currently signed up for 15 credit hours, 6 of which are on campus, the rest of which are online. They campus classes are evenings, Monday through Wednesday. I will have Lilly by day, and Paige will have Lilly in the evenings.

You gotta do what you gotta do.

Lost and Found

I FOUND MY KEYS!!!!!!!

In my purse...
in a "never before seen" pocket...


I feel stupid, really stupid.

Music Monday.

We have not posted much lately. It's not that we have been dormant or anything. We are in the middle, (not literally, I hope) of a MASSIVE project. We hope to finish it within a month. After that it will be just about time to sicken you all with baby-picture-overload, a common blog virus. I hear it is rather contagious.

In the meantime (do they call it "mean"time because the waiting is so cruel?) I have some videos to share. Yeah for me!

If you have never heard of the literal version music videos, then it is quite possible you have a life. Well you can say so no more, for here is a literal version music video, wherein what is sung is what is happening in the video. GENIUS! (The original version is posted below.

Pregnancy Brain

Went to my doctor's appointment.
Tried to leave.
No keys.
Checked in every office on the 1st and 2nd floor.
No keys.
Called Brian.
No keys.
Brian rescued me.
Still no keys.

This does not bode well.

Panorama Series 9

This last weekend was Fall Break, both for UVU and for Alpine School District. We were able to take a couple of days to go and meet up with Mom and Dad Barlow in Saint George. We were close enough to the temple that I ran on over 3 times to get pictures under various lighting conditions. Here are some of the results.

Panorama Series 8

Karen Carpenter was wrong. Mondays, quite possibly, but rainy days seldom get me down. Rainy days give you some of the most spectacular shots. These are from yesterday.

Panorama Series 7

I started taking these panoramic shots 2 weeks before the current semester started, only because I finally figured out how. Ironically, a week into my current semester, I find out that the first assignment for my photography and compositing class is, you guessed it, panoramics from multiple images.

Here are the ones I did just for that class.

Mr City Men

Mr City Men

Do you remember the Mr. Men Books?



A 3d Artist by the name of Eric Lerner took the concept and expanded on it a bit. He created 5 videos of what he calls "Mr. City Men". The music is fun, all the clips are around 1 - 3 minutes, but what I like most is the integration. The way he worked the 3d characters into the scenes. Reflections, Shadows, clipping as the characters "move behind" objects. This is another one of my inspirations.

Re - Landscaping

I was downstairs this afternoon, in the office, trying not to sleep and get some homework done.

Okay, I was out cold.

My friend Jake was upstairs at the kitchen table running numbers for a project when suddenly he heard and FELT a commotion outside. He went to investigate and found THIS.


He found the kid very apologetic, even though he had desperately been trying to back out of the predicament (his car impaled itself on a bent fence post when he tried to back out.)

He then came in, woke me up, and told me I might want to come outside and to go easy on the kid. turns out that as the young driver turned the corner onto our cul-de-sac, the stearing suddenly became unbearably difficult. Then the brakes quit.


The poor kid didn't want his parents to find out, but we insisted and called the police. He actually ripped part of the bumper of Jake's Four runner before dismantling the fence, giving a buzzcut to one of our boxwood plants, and standing the lilac on it's side. One of the officers jokingly remarked that, "Hey, at least he wasn't parking on the street!"


A wrecker was required to lift the car OFF the fence post it was impaled on, seen under the car in this picture. It's the black post sticking up.

Damage is done, and tomorrow we will make contact with his insurance company. Tomorrow we find out if the lilac goes immediately into shock or if it is going to take a while.

It's funny, but suddenly I feel like my yard is completely open to the world, although I have never actually bothered to close the gate anyway.


In the end no one was hurt. Yet. Later as Jake and I were standing outside laughing over the whole thing, the kid and his father drove by in the family mini-van. Dad did NOT look happy.