Fencing 4/4/09

I went to my first tournament today. My main goal was to not finish last. My that-would-be-awesome goal was to survive the first cut and make it into the elimination rounds (thus earning my Salle Auriol patch). And of course the real goal was to not embarrass myself. On those standards, I did fairly well. The field was 25 fencers, ranging from a C rank to unrated (ranks are A-E and unrated; I’m unrated of course). We had five pools of five, then five more pools of five. You fence everyone in your pool, a 5-point bout, then everyone is ranked based on wins and points, then you go into a single elimination. For this tournament, they cut the field to 16 after the pools. I won one in my first pool, none in my second, and finished 22 out of 25. So I didn’t finish last (yay!), didn’t make the cut (boo!), and didn’t really embarrass myself (yay!).

yes, that’s me in the neon green socks.
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New Chandelier!

When I bought my house, it was equipped with a bunch of those ceiling lights that look like boobs, like this one. We’ve been doing a lot of redecorating of course, and E’s taste has started to influence mine — we’re moving away from dark, modern, and asian to more colors and a little more color and flash. So I started looking for an interesting chandelier on craigslist and found this:

In the pictures, it looked arty and elegant; in reality, it was definitely a little more kitschy 80s than we thought. But we still liked it and figured, for $40, it was worth the risk. Well it turned out looking great in our minimal dining room, and a big improvement over the boob.

Why So Glum, Chum?

What’s the fuss, gus?
What’s the trouble, bubble?
Why so mean, bean?
Why the hissy, missy?
Why the squirmin, herman?
Why the wiggles, giggles?

The Elusive AWOO

At about 6-8 weeks, Nora’s main mode of expression was still crying; she didn’t have many other sounds in her vocabulary. Around that time, she got a cold or something and was stuffed up for a while and started sneezing. She’d often sneeze a couple of times and then try to sneeze again but miss, instead emitting a super loud AWOO sound which was hilarious. It was the first non-crying sound we’d heard her make and pretty much the cutest thing we’d ever heard (probably not the last time I’ll say that). We kept trying to catch it on video but never succeeded. And now, at three months, she’s figured out how to sneeze without accidentally saying AWOO (though she makes similar sounds along with her growing vocabulary of coos and shrieks) and we’re afraid we’ll never hear it again. The elusive AWOO is sort of like the sound at about 0:43 of this video, except it actually sounds like she is saying “AWOO!”

A Searing Indictment of Modern Suburban Malaise

Yesterday’s Comics Curmudgeon highlights a “Hi and Lois” strip that pretty much covers the “modern suburban malaise” genre. I like Josh’s take on “Revolutionary Road” too — it does kind of make sense as a “Titanic” sequel.

After my great blog malaise (thanks for the suggestions), all I really enjoy reading right now are comics and food blogs. Politics, go to hell. In other news, this is my first Optic post using my new WordPress install rather than my old Movable Type install with the handcrafted crossposting script. hoorah.