xmas spirit and bike porn! (and When Panoramas Go Horribly Wrong)

My regular readers (all four of you) know that I'm a fan of panoramas taken from my balcony. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'm technically competent, or that Hugin panorama creator will always save me (even when I spend a LOT of time manually providing stitch points.)

I nevertheless thought this was kind of cool looking, in an apocalyptic kind of way. This is a 33% version, converted to jpeg, since the full size tiff version is 7.6mb.

Speaking of apocalypse, we LOVES us some post-apocalyptic and dystopian movies. last night our netflix movie was among the worst movies I've ever actually finished watching: Cloverfield. Totally inexplicably to me, Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 76% fresh rating. Some of them got it right, though, like Brian Orndorf, from DVDTalk.com: "Basically a 70-minute YouTube video, Cloverfield has all the head-rattling jolt and dramatic verisimilitude of a prank phone call" and Kyle Smith, of KyleSmithOnline.com: "A combination of unpleasantness and stupidity that would be difficult to match, unless you were stuck in bed with the shingles while being forced to watch The Ghost Whisperer."

On another note, just in case any of you have ever accused me of being anti-christmas, or ever even CONSIDERED such an unjust accusation:


And as more evidence of it, I picked up a super deluxe xmas tree for J. From the ground. In the bike parking area at Whole Paycheck (where they obnoxiously kept storing xmas trees, so for over a week I kept having to shove them out of the way.) Here is said xmas tree:

Don't look too closely, or you might realize that it's, uhhh, about three feet by three feet. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to throw it away today, since it drips a little sap, and J and I are both going to be (separately) gone for xmas anyway.

California tomorrow(!)