katakat.com bytes from a participant observer

Getting to play with this stuff is the coolest part of my job. Lately the 10+ hour days are getting to me. It's crunch time before school starts up again, leaving about 8 working days to finish all major summer projects.

Click here: LRC Virtual Tour

Sometime it's the mundane, everyday stuff that will kill you. Or at least make you hurt really bad. I called my karate senior to explain my absence for this week due to my back problems, and he completely topped it with his own tale of woe, which was so awful it pretty much made mine look like a stubbed toe. It seems he was out mountain biking on December 31st and part of the ride included crossing a Home Depot parking lot to get to a trail.

I was visiting brother Dom today, and he was jamming in his studio with a high school friend, Joel, who recently moved out here too (with wife and family). Dom was on drums and Joel on electric guitar, and since I was just standing there, I was handed a tambourine to be useful. Dom's been teaching himself to play drums for a few weeks now, and is quite good at it. After a little while, Dom and Joel switched instruments. We were playing children's songs to hard rock music, like "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "B-I-N-G-O"; I was laughing the whole time.

look

Here is my first try at a holiday centerpiece. One of my co-workers had a party at a florist's shop and after we'd all had tea and cake, we made centerpieces. Yes, the greenery and flowers are real. I'd never done something like this before. It was really fun, and so different from doing things in the virtual realm.