Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I started doing my “homework” today… the first homework I’ve had in a very, very long time! This was the first week of Maya, so it was just covering simple modeling in 2011, as well as getting comfortable with the interface and core commands… nonetheless, I couldn’t resist getting ahead of myself and covering the roof with otter fur. I am sure that when we get into animation next week that I will be unable to resist putting various particle emitters in every orifice. So much fun!

I also got myself a new toy, one of the new portable Fujitsu duplex scanners (duplex in that it scans both sides of the paper simultaneously). I got it because I have mountains of paperwork — bills, letters, legal documents, and so on — and I think that my life will be immensely improved if it all just gets shot into my computer (and then on to my accountant, my lawyer, my archives, or whatever) and then eaten by the shredder. A much better than the current “solution”, which is put it in a box in the corner thinking, “I’ll do it tomorrow”, “tomorow” being in the sense of the day that is always after today, but never today.

Nefarious’s new “toy” of the day (in addition to the Night Fury dragon that Caitlin and I got on our morning walk — and a McDonalds coffee for her and an apple pie for me) was stealing my glasses, something that fascinates her way more than I can understand, and she spent a while admiring herself in the mirror and remarking on how much older they made her look, which is true.

As I’ve said enough times to bore you, Nefarious and I have been on a major games kick lately, and probably have spent two or three hours a day — at least — playing various games. There are a few games where she can consistently beat me (memory being the most obvious — she has a killer memory), a few where she can hold her own (Othello, Chess), and a few on which I am the consistent winner (Whack-A-Mole). As I mentioned before, every game we play we tweak the rules and I think improve upon the game quite a bit. For example, I don’t enjoy games that have a heavy “chance” element in them, and prefer for games to be skill, intellect, and strategy based, so a lot of the rules we’ve come up with are about taking games and giving the brain a bigger role. If I didn’t have too many aborted projects already, I’d start a site of game rule improvements — although for all I know there already is one.

We’ve been burning through lots more Harry Potter (Order of the Phoenix, a behemoth of a book), and we’ve hit the point where they’re just starting to talk about forming the DIY Defense Against The Dark Arts classes, so the tempo has picked up after the three hundred page introduction, so Nefarious is always quite eager to get to the day’s reading.

Anyway, I’ve really been trying to keep to a proper sleep schedule, but it’s all messed up, and I’ve been sooooo tired during the day. When I get up between 6 and 7 AM to make breakfast and get Nefarious off to school (she is supposed to be there at 8:15 AM) I’m full of energy, and that usually stays for Caitlin and my walk, but when I get back, I crash and there have been a few days where I’ve literally slept for the whole day — until I leave at 3 to go back to the school — and nothing would keep me awake.

Last night at about midnight (already a later bedtime than I’d planned upon — I was shooting for 10 PM), I was incredibly tired, and just as I was about to fall asleep I realized I had to queue a couple of actions on my computer, which meant literally nothing more than clicking on about a dozen links. That’s it. As I said, this process started at midnight, and should have taken at most a minute, but somehow I didn’t finish it until 2 AM!!! This means that I must have been passing out between clicks — I suspect with my eyes open — and just “going offline” for twenty minutes, and probably because I wasn’t asleep long enough to dream, I wasn’t even aware until I looked at the clock and put two and two together that it happened. To make sleep matters weirder, I was woken up at 6 AM by a horrible earthquake, and it was not until I was fully awake from the vibrations that I realized they hadn’t happened at all, but were the remnant of some dream, my dreams having been especially vibrant lately.

Other than that, I am eating some amazing white chocolate lemon truffles that Caitlin made.