Happy

Delivering Happy

~ lobablanca

How, you might be wondering, can one deliver “happy”? Allow me to show you:

stvset

Yes, my friends, that would be all seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager, still in their sealed DVD boxes. Delivered right to my door. That is how you deliver happy. And who made this wonderful delivery? The U.S. Postal Service! They paid for my education and now they bring me packages full of happy.

And why am I so surprised that they are all still wrapped? Because this is another one of my famous “used” purchases. I told you before that I’m cheap. So when I found this set for an AMAZING price, I went ahead and purchased it, fully expecting it to be a used set from someone’s collection, with some shelf wear on the packaging. Yet again, one of these sellers has blown me away by sending me a brand new product.

I think the USPS should consider changing their tagline from “Neither snow nor sleet nor blah-blah-whatever” to “USPS: Delivering Happy Straight to Your Door.”

Works for me.

Cheeky AND Talented!

~ lobablanca
Photo from imagesafari.com
Photo from imagesafari.com

I love Peanuts comics. They’ve been a staple of my geeky life since I was a wee wolf. Even now, part of my morning ritual is to read the daily strip at Snoopy.com before I dive into my Secret Squirrel government work.

This ritual has been a bit derailed for the past few months (actually, it seems like it’s been this way since well before last Christmas). Snoopy.com is closed for upgrades, and so all traffic has been redirected to the Peanuts page of Comics.com. I suppose that’s acceptable, since it allows me to continue to get my daily dose of Chuck & Co. But I miss the official site.

So I thought I’d be sneaky and try other URLs related to Snoopy.com, just to see if maybe there was a way to see what’s going on behind the curtain (hey, it’s worked on other sites; why wouldn’t it work here?). I started with www.snoopy.net. What I got, instead of a sneak peek at the new Peanuts site, was an eyeful of happy.

Seems that a photographer in Ohio has purchased this URL and set it to redirect visitors to his own site, imagesafari. From what I’ve gathered, the photographer in question is Jon Anhold, and he’s been posting online since 2003. In fact, it looks like he started posting 10 days before incite.thought went live. Kismet? I think so.

I know very little about the mechanics of professional photography, but I do recognize what is aesthetically pleasing to my amateur eye. From that perspective, I think Jon’s photos are gorgeous. They’re wonderful compositions with rich, deep colors, beautiful use of natural and artificial lighting, and an ever-present sense of whimsy. The photo I use here is from his site. By no means is this ducky the best of what I saw, but it’s rubber ducky, dammit! He’s so fun…he makes bath time lots of fun…you know the rest, right?

Anyway. He also focuses on subjects that remind me very much of the kind of photos my dad loves to take: landscapes, flora, fauna, machinery, airplanes, cars. There’s a definite sense of comforting familiarity when I look at the pictures at imagesafari. So if you have some free time, I encourage you to go to imagesafari and see for yourself the eyeful of happy that greeted me during my failed attempt at Snoopy.com sneak-a-peekery.

Holy Creative Literacy Campaign, Batman!

~ lobablanca
Best. Resolution. Ever.
Best. Resolution. Ever.

So Dutch Ruppersberger, a U.S. Representative here in the great state of Muralynd (pronounce it as it’s spelled and you’ll sound like a local!) has proposed a resolution for “Free Comic Book Day.”

Actually, I think this was just his version of yelling “First” to all his other representatives, because Free Comic Book Day has been going on since 2002. But that’s okay. It’s not like Congress has a lot of other things on their plate right now.

Actually, this concept is pretty cool. My grandmother used to always encourage my voracious need to read by saying, “It doesn’t matter what you’re reading, just as long as you’re reading.” She might have had a different opinion had I been reading something like To Serve Mankind for the tasty recipes, but that wasn’t the case. Comic books can be quite the awesome gateway drug to other reading adventures. Or they can stand alone. There are some amazing comics…excuse me, graphic novels out there, that carry as much weight as “serious literature.”

So tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day 2009. Looks like there’s a nice selection from which to choose this year, including X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in honor of the movie hitting theaters today. I’ve never gone to this event before. Comics have never been high on my Collector radar. I’ve had the pleasure of reading other people’s collections, and that has satisfied me. But I might check this out.

I’m also going to put in a plug for one of my all-time favorite illustrators in the game today: Frank Cho. He’s going to be signing books from 1-4 at the Cards Comics & Collectibles here in Reistertown. He is an illustrating god and I have had the distinct pleasure of witnessing his talent from the very beginning (he did a deliciously bawdy strip for The Diamondback at UMCP). He’s also a cheeky little Monkey Boy TM and seems like he’d be really awesome in person. So check him out, check out Free Comic Book Day, and say hey to Comic Book Guy from me.

Tip of the paw to A2 for bringing this to the lair’s attention 🙂

Color Me Happy

~ lobablanca

I realized something after yesterday’s follow-up cranky post: I’ve already got four posts under “Surly” but I don’t even have a “Happy” category. So consider this post me fixing that problem. I’m actually not an unhappy person; I just carry around a lot of surliness inside me. I might be an early 30s girl on the outside, but inside I think I’m more like that cantankerous old dude that Dana Carvey used to play every now and then on SNL’s Weekend Update.

So here’s my first official post on things that make me happy. Today, for instance, was a happy day. First day of the season to break the 80-degree mark (Fahrenheit, that is). It was hot, it was sunny, and it was perfect for a hiking trip to Great Falls. Of course, when I say “hiking,” what I really mean is, “walking along a dirt path for a few miles up and then turning around and coming back.” No actual climbing on rocks was involved this trip. But it was a perfectly lovely hike. Not too many people, but plenty of wildlife. We saw little lizards, turtles lined up on rocks to catch some rays, dogs running everywhere – plus two blue herons. One even let me get close enough to it for the lovely shot below. Of course, he probably felt more than safe since there was water between us, but it was still nice to be trusted that much by wildlife. And look in the lower right corner of the photo. I didn’t realize it at the time, but there’s a little turtle surfacing.

We even saw a snake swimming in the canal. I snapped a few shots, but the canal water is so disgusting looking…it didn’t make me happy to look at it, and I can only imagine that it didn’t make the snake happy to be swimming in it. So I left it out of this post. Maybe I’ll use it later…when I’m back to feeling surly 😉

Wildlife gone mild
Wildlife gone mild