Radio can be fun

Yesterday Andy and i heard an ad for Mighty Leaf Tea and couldn't help laughing uncontrollably at various phrases used. We are children in big bodies, when "loose leaf," "mighty leaf teabags," and "full bodied flavor" all elicit howls. For those who haven't heard yet, Angie is going by Andy these days, in a long-desired effort to ungender her name. Most people i tell about this disagree that Andy is a gender-neutral name, but i think she's ok with it being on the masculine side. She's definitely planning on having chest surgery, but i think that's the extent of the body modification she's going to undergo. It's not that she wants to be a man, it's just that she doesn't feel the need to carry around a bunch of extra weight she finds utterly (udderly?) pointless. When Antonio is done with them, i think she will be, too.

Andy has fully recovered from her post-pregnancy-minor-complication surgery; She's
healthy enough to go to the Union hall to wait for work, and healthy enough to go to the gym and exercise, and go out on dates. She's really enjoying SF; not having to explain the term "poly" to people helps immensely.

New Year's Resolution

This year, i told myself, i will learn an instrument. For some reason, i feel the need to start at the beginning and learn to read sheet music. Progress is elusive: i know what the lines on the sheets of music represent, but i still have a hard time remembering the notation for note durations. When i was young, i knew this better than i know it now. I could even play a recorder reasonably near what the notes on the page instructed. Where did that go? The same place my fluent Portuguese went, i suppose. I hope that some remnant is buried in my brain, but i fear that it's all been flushed from memory.

On the other hand, i'm starting to remember c++, which is slightly more critical. I also have a great relationship with Antonio, which is highest on my list of priorities.

So that's what the ISO setting means!

It only took 14 months, but i've finally started using the manual features of my spiffy camera. I knew there had to be a way to take low-light pictures, i just never bothered tweaking the settings by hand. The camera does so much automatically, i figured "it will adjust for low light when i turn the flash off, right?" Well, not so much. That seems like something it should be easy to put into the software: Turn off the flash, bump up the ISO setting (which is the digital equivalent of having "faster" film). Alas, no. The next step is figuring out how to make that setting persistent, since most of my pictures are indoors and relatively low light.