Sometimes I just stop and think about how nice it would be to open a bakery or coffee shop with a few friends and bake all day for a living.

Of course it's not as magical as I see it in my head, but it sure is nice to think about the wonderful aromas that would float in the air everyday, meeting new people, seeing some familiar faces, and have a relatively serene time in the kitchen mixing ingredients, rolling them out, kneading them and popping sheet pans of dough into the ovens.

Right now I'm obviously longing to bake something, but I neither have the time nor the resources at the moment, as I'm waiting for April to roll around so I can use my coupon and go to raid my neighborhood organic grocer's for flour, sugar and all the regular culprits in my baking adventures. Sometimes I think about other magical things, like living in some tiny beach town where everyone knows each other and they have tourism only once a year in the summer, and during the rest of the year everyone just hangs out until the next season. I guess what I'm imagining more than anything is a sense of peace and serenity in my life where I'm in control of it and capable of everything that comes my way. Which is obviously what I feel is my greatest flaw, and although I have hope of achieving that sense of balance, it doesn't feel like I'm within reach.

I suppose it doesn't help that my last cooking endeavors have turned out very unappealingly.

You can only have so many off days before it becomes worrying.

*cough*

Oh the forlorn malady of being deathly ill with a head cold. How will I ever survive such trauma?

I don't care if that last sentence didn't make sense, I'm sick dammit!!

Honestly, I'm such a mess of a miserable cow when I'm sick, I complain constantly, never smile, and basically wallow in how achy, snotty, hurty (fuck you, I don't care if it's not a word) and junky I feel. And I randomly say how I'm going to die.

Yup, I feel pretty sorry for anyone that has to converse with me when I'm sick. Luckily, I usually only get this kind of cold twice a year *knock on wood* because of the changing of the seasons from hot to cold and cold to hot. Right now we're experiencing the latter and I'm not happy about it.

But at least I get to stay at home today because I would probably spread it to anyone I sat near for extended amounts of time, which will give me some time to relax and get better. I'm laying here in bed in a sea of kleenex and Moo is quietly napping next to me. It looks like it's going to be a good day *knock on wood*.

Eventful Much...?

So yesterday was a pretty eventful day, a few friends and I had decided a while ago to drive down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to go take a look around, as it's less than three hours away and we're on Spring Break (supposedly).

And that is where I rediscovered my love of watching jellyfish.
Really, it's so relaxing, how you could not love watching jellyfish? I realize they sting and they're awful and they can kill you without really wanting too, but still, they're so beautiful, especially when they're lit right.

So I've got almost 60 photos from Monterey, and describing the experience would never do it justice, so click here to go take a look at the photos, which I've conveniently put in a separate set for you.

In other news, it was a little before two p.m. when we were in the gift shop, I was looking for a material item to remind me of this trip when there a huge crashing noise and the building shook. For whatever reason my first thought was "Fuck, an enclosure's broken and now we're going to get eaten by a runaway octopus." When in fact it was an empty tour bus that ran into the aquarium. Luckily it hit a column otherwise it would have gone straight through the wall and into a crowd of people including my friends and I.

To say I was freaked out for the remainder of the day is an understatement. Luckily no one got hurt. Since it only happened yesterday, not a lot of details have been released but here's an article from The Herald of Monterey County. We took that as our cue to leave the aquarium and go get lunch. We ate, snapped more photos (some of which are on facebook) and headed back to the bay area.

Enough eventfulness for me to last a while...

A Beautiful, Inspirational Lecture

3D Viz Magic

I'm just learning 3D Viz, kind of for the second time (I took a 3D Studio Max class a few years ago, but quite a bit of advancement has been made and I didn't learn the program very deeply) and I'm just playing around with it for different projects, thought I'd show you some quick mock ups, and the wonderfulness that is Global Illumination in V-Ray.