Weekly Round Up

So Monday was an epic SCM Dinner. Seriously I think we had about 20 people (not a *huge* exaggeration) over and @clairam managed to feed them all :) Was awesome tho, exactly the evening I needed. (I promise to not throw around any in-jokes on here).

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On Tuesday I spent the evening glued to my computer (we'd had no power on Monday afternoon/evening) catching up on my #365 project. Some days the taking of photos is difficult, some days it is easy, but the bit that's always tough is downloading the 100-odd I took each day and sifting thru to find a gem to post to flikr. I've only had one day so far (Tuesday, in fact, I think) where I haven't been at all thrilled with any of the pics and have had to just settle in the end for the best of a bad bunch. But hey, it's all about experimentation and I was trying to get an evening shot of the moon using @tfrayne's GorillaPod (she's lent it to me for a little while so I can decide if I want to get one for myself since I've found I definitely struggle with in-focus long-exposure shots, as is typical in low-light situations).

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I have included 3 of my #365 photos here (since I'm not putting the link up) for you to see. Oddly the shot of the lights (which is one of my favourite pics so far), wasn't done using a tripod. The bunnies are also making marvelous subjects :) Although Lily has become my most frequent little model surprisingly enough! Rex is very difficult to get properly into focus because he moves so much and he really doesn't seem to like having this big camera pointed at him - or maybe it's the click-noise that bothers him. And Coal, well Coal is usually distracted by digging the biggest hole in the garden. And with all that digging motion, she also doesn't often make for good photographs ... luckily the day I took the photo here she was in a rare playful mood and sat posing nicely for me for ages :)

And then last night, I finally actually "subscribed" (yes, paid for!) to the online dating. Before I'd just put up my profile and people could contact me, but I couldn't reply or message anyone. So last week I sorta decided that if I was going to do this I might as well do it properly and planned to subscribe on the weekend, but there wasn't a free minute to sit down and actually do it, on Monday there was no power and on Tuesday I was drowning in photographs and on Wednesday I figured I couldn't put it off any longer.

Although I did debate again whether I should bother signing up. I mean don't get me wrong, last week I had a lot of fun with dipping my toes into the world of online dating, but once you've put your photo up and you get 50million profile views in half an hour ... well, after that everything seems mundane - haha! But, after subscribing yesterday evening my interest got piqued again. I imagine it'll be on a constant ebb-and-flow, honestly. I wrote back to a few of the people who'd sent me messages that I hadn't immediately deleted due to exasperation. Honestly, I have definitely had messages from guys who are pretty much the online version of those construction workers who cat-call and whistle as every girl walks past ... and all the girls are thinking "Dude, does that really *ever* work for you?". Trying their luck.

I'm being pretty brutal about my non-negotiables tho. That's one of the perks of this. You get to browse, which is not unlike people-watching while out at a club, but now you get to immediately check out if there are any red-flags before you even speak to them. Although there is plenty you have no idea about, but you can just cull the herd a little with key factors like age and, for me, regular or weekly religious attendance.

So yes, last night I started replying to messages. I even sent 2 unsolicited messages of my own. Which was nerve-wracking in itself. But hey, as @beagle_momma said to me, what's the worst that could happen ... they don't reply ... and you've still never met them in real life, so it's not like they "know" you ... somehow it takes some of the sting out of the rejection. Oh, and ps. a one-line "hey how's things going" might work as an initiation message, but if you stick with the one-line replies, things are going to get very boring, very quickly.

I am still definitely not ready for the big-leagues yet, making a plan to meet someone in real life freaks me out completely. But I figure we'll warm up to it ... maybe?

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And then I went to get some dinner with CollegeInstructor at Royal Thai, which was yummy :)

Something else I wanted to mention that I've noticed is that I seem unable to commit to my Peru trip. Something is stopping me. Mostly I am blaming it on the inability to decide if I want to sign-up for a 4-day hike in the mountains (read Inca Trail) or not. It seems quite daunting to me. But I don't know if I'm just making excuses. It's nearly the end of May and I haven't booked this year's trip yet ... it's bothering me but I seem unable to do anything about it. Any words of wisdom would be appreciated.