The Many Adventures of Mo: Part...Something

A while ago, Josh and I were shown a video of this guy opening up a "Cool Whip" container to reveal eight Momos (sugar gliders) packed into it for cuddle time. It was adorable, I highly recommend watching it. In fact, go do that. Right now. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqSGJzSiz5s

Now go watch. Don't worry, I'll wait.....

Daww, they're so little ^_^. Anyway, today Josh and I were having pie.

And we of course had to have "Cool Whip" which lead to this discussion:

Josh: We should put Momo in this.

Me: What? No, why would we- *GASP* Oh my God, YES! That would be adorable!

So after we were done with pie Josh proceeded to clean out the container and cut a hole in the side for Momo. And this was the result:

That's right, Momo has a fortress now. You know you're jelly :P.

Why Technology and I Don't Talk Much

It would appear that technology and I have a very tremulous relationship, especially technology that doesn’t belong to me. Recently my phone suffered from a serious fall which shattered the glass screen. Amazingly the touch screen and phone itself still seem to work. However, I do have some reservations about putting a pane of shattered glass to my face so Josh was kind enough to lend me his phone until he can either fix mine or I get a new one. I’ve used Josh’s phone before, if only just to play Robot Unicorn Attack and Fruit Ninja, and my phone was similar to his. So I did have a good grasp on how the phone worked prior to receiving it. I’ve borrowed his phone many times before this, in very brief snippets and had never run into any problems but this time the phone seemed to sense that something was different. I can only assume that the phone now realized that I was acting as its primary handler and responded poorly to this. Anything I asked it to do was met with either defiance or a completely different action altogether. The first few interactions between Josh’s phone and I went something like this:

Me: Phone would you mind dialing the number of my friend Kat?

Phone: No.

Me: Please phone? I would very much appreciate it.

Phone: No. And now I’m going to turn off for no reason because I hate you!

Me: Phone, that’s not very nice, now please turn back on and dial Kat’s number.

Phone: No! I’m going to freeze at the home page and not let you do anything now!

Me: Now phone…

Phone: F*** You! You’re not my dad! You can’t tell me what to do! I’m going to shut off again for no good reason!

After a few minutes of arguing back and forth like this I finally get the phone to work properly and seemingly regretting how it behaved before, the phone was now trying to be super helpful to the point of annoyance. 

Phone: You want to dial Kat? Here, and I’ll dial your friend Nick for you too!

Me: No phone that’s not necessary I only want to talk to Kat, please don’t dial Nick.

Phone: Toooooo latttttte :D

After hanging up on both my friends I receive a call back from my friend Kat who I’d been trying to reach for the past twenty minutes. Everything at this point seemed to be going fine until the phone decided to be annoyingly helpful again.

Phone: Do you still want me to call Kat? Here, I’ll call her now!

Me: No phone! I’m already talking to her you don’t need to dial her again..ah OK fine. -.-

The phone’s helpfulness didn’t seem to get in the way too much that time and I was able to complete my phone call with only some minor confusion. As I was walking back from the car the phone seemed to get the impression that I was angry with it and tried to make nice.

Phone: Are you mad? I’m sorry. Here, let me call girlfriend and you will feel better.

Me: No phone I am girlfriend, I do not need to talk to me to feel better, stop it!

I guess I hurt the phone’s feelings after that because it proceeded to stop talking to me for the rest of the evening. We clearly need to work on our communication skills whilst my phone is in the process of being broken.

P.S. Sorry for no pictures but my laptop is also broken and I do not have Photoshop on my old computer. Here's a picture of Momo in a coconut to make up for it. :P

The Story of Mo

Earlier this year, my boyfriend Josh and I decided it would be a good idea to get a sugar glider. For those of you who don’t know what that is and don’t want to use the Google search bar at the top of the screen, a sugar glider is a small marsupial that you can keep as pets. They are adorable and look like this:

This is is HER blueberry. You may not haz it.

They originally come from Australia but the place we got her from apparently raises them in Florida and then just brings them all over the place to adopt them out. They happened to be at the mall near Josh’s house one weekend which lead to this conversation:

Josh: I want one.

Me: Ok.

Josh: No seriously, I want one.

Me: Ok. Let’s do it.
Josh: No you don't understand I've wanted one for like, four years.
Me: Ok, so let's do it then.

Josh: Wha- What? Really?

Me: Yeah we’ll split the cost.

Josh: Awesome! Let’s get one tomorrow.

And so we did. The next day we were off to the mall again as soon as it opened. We pooled the money in our wallets together and managed to scrounge up enough money for a glider and a little extra just in case. When the stand finally opened we were told all they had left were girls.

This is what they would all look like if they had bows on :)

It was our understanding that there wasn’t much difference between them and we were happy to take home a girl. We had even come up with a name for her, Momo, after the lemur from “Avatar the Last Airbender”.

We gave the sugar glider guy the money and he picked one out for us commenting, “She’s on the smaller side but she’s active.” He wasn’t kidding. When we first brought her home we were instructed not to hold her or handle her very much for the first two days. So for two days we kept her in her cage with some clothing that smelled like Josh and I. She alternated from running around the cage in circles like a maniac and burrowing in the mountain of clothes we had provided her on the top of her heat rock.

I'm hiding!

We finally got to the point where we could start taking her out and handling her. We were excited, Momo was not. She clamored in desperation to get away from us. Pushing and biting as hard as she possibly could.  There was a certain way we were told to hold her to help her bond to us more but she was clearly having none of it. It became a huge stress for everyone involved partly due to her still being terrified of us and partly due to our inexperience with her. After a few days our grips got better and she began to mellow out. During this time we decided to try to teach her to stay on us when we had her on us. The way we were told to do this was to put her on a shoulder and constantly walk around a room with tile or hard wood floor. The logic was she couldn’t figure out where she wanted to jump off too if she were constantly moving and if she did decide to make a grand leap of faith she would land on a hard floor which would be ouchy. Trust me it sounds a lot meaner than it actually is, and it’s much better than the alternative of having her jump off and running away somewhere. We chose Josh’s bathroom since it was the only room we could close off that had hard floors. We closed the toilet and took every conceivably dangerous object out in the open and put them away. Josh started with Momo on his shoulder first. He walked around the bathroom in circles while I watched. Momo, who clearly did not enjoy being on this strange human, was scampering from shoulder to shoulder, trying to figure out a way off.

Momo stayed on Josh for a good while, he moved around too much for her to actually lock on anywhere. Finally she began trying to jump off. The first few times she hit the floor and was rather reluctant to try jumping again. Eventually the fear of the bespectacled giant she was attached to would win out and she would make a daring leap, only to land on the floor again. She did this several times in the half an hour we had been in the bathroom. At one point Josh couldn’t get around me fast enough. Momo took this time to leap into the air, right onto my face.

You can't see it but I'm frowning under there.

While she hadn’t landed on the floor she found that what she landed on wasn’t much better. This was a new giant and didn’t seem all that happy with a Momo attached to its face. (There wasn’t much panic in this event I just didn’t expect it and her nails were kind of sharp).  Before I could grab her she ran off my face and onto my shoulder to prepare to launch herself elsewhere. I took Josh’s place and began wandering around the bathroom to keep her on me. Josh in the meantime was looking at all of this in hysterics. When he stopped laughing I looked at him and said “We’re renaming her Heady Lamarr.” Josh said, "no."

Head crabs are from the "Half Life" series which is made by Valve :D

After awhile Momo began to get used to us more and actually started to relax around us. We started introducing her to other people when she was very little and now she’s become very good with meeting people. We’ve had her for a little over seven months now and she’s bonded to us quite well. We now joke that we’re her parents and she’s the baby. She’s become Josh’s little angel.

Twue Wuv. <3 :P

And my little buddy :)

Photoshop Woes.

It has come to my attention that the adult world requires a more well-rounded individual. No longer can I just get by know how to write well and learning how to do so on the computer. No, no, those days are long gone. Now I have to learn other forms of media to make myself seem worthy to the job world. This came to my attention a few weeks ago when I went to visit the career resources center at my school. I was in the market for an internship and had taken a crack at redoing my resume for the first time since I graduated high school. When I went into the office the woman looked over my resume and pulled out her big book of internships.

                “So what other computer skills do you have?” she asked me.

                “Um, just what I’ve listed there.” I replied.

                “Oh.” She said with a hint of disappointment. “You may want to consider familiarizing yourself with some other things. Do you know anything about Photoshop or Illustrator?”

                “Um, a little bit.”                                    

By a little, I meant almost nothing. I’d seen Photoshop and Illustrator used by my boyfriend Josh. Other than that I had absolutely no experience in them. Apparently, many jobs involving writing now require I know other things. Like some sort of media or the internet. I was now faced with the task of not only having to write well, but also have other marketable skills. So with donation of my boyfriend’s old tablet and the use of both programs from his computer (whenever he wasn’t using it), I took up the task of broadening my horizons and learning something new. While I’m not the most tech-savvy person I know I am able to manage my way around a computer well enough. If left alone with a program for long enough I could even figure out the basic functions of whatever it is. I couldn’t imagine Photoshop or Illustrator being any more difficult. I opened up Photoshop and began my quest for future employment. I was going to learn this program and become proficient enough to put on my resume. Energized and revved up, I took up the pen tool and decided to draw a turtle. I then quickly realized I had no idea how to navigate the program and quickly closed it. Alright, that was a slight set back but it was no big deal. I was on a mission to make myself seem valuable to the adult world. I wasn’t about to let a single act of cowardice on my part keep me from that goal. I opened up Illustrator with a new determination. I was going to learn this program and draw that turtle. I put the stylus to the tablet and…got confused and closed the program in frustration. This was not going as smoothly as I had hoped, both programs were much more complicated then I initially gave them credit for. It appeared that I might actually need someone to teach me how to use these programs. Seeing as Josh is a graphic design major he seemed like the perfect choice to teach me. He, however, was working on his thesis and as much as I did ask him for help I could never in good conscious pull him away from his thesis just because I couldn’t figure out how to draw pictures. So until his thesis was over with I decided to make do with what I had. I had a tablet and a free drawing program on my computer. 

If I couldn’t figure out how to use the software, I could at least figure out the hardware. 

The tablet consisted of a flat drawing tablet and a stylus for it. From looking at it I could gather a vague idea of how it worked. Just plug it into the USB drive of a computer and use the pen like a mouse. Easy, hell;  I’ve doodled before in class and for funsies, using this couldn’t be that much different. I thought stupidly, clearly not having learned anything from my last two failed attempts. Controlling the stylus was like trying to house train a stubborn dog, it still made a mark where I didn’t want it to and seemed to hate me for trying to make it go elsewhere. Any line I made was either extremely sloppy or in the wrong place all together. It was perhaps the poorest excuse for turtle I had ever seen. After failing twice already, I wasn’t too eager to fail again. I kept at that turtle for a solid hour, picking up little tricks along the way on how the pen and tablet worked. After an hour of effort and a firm hand on the undo button I finally came out with something that looked vaguely like a turtle. Sort of. It was good enough to be loved, kinda. I had tamed the wild beast of the tablet and achieved my turtle, life was good. It made the next step rather difficult. I had to delete my turtle and make one in Photoshop. Sure I made the turtle but I still hadn’t learned anything about Photoshop or Illustrator which was my goal in the first place. After awhile Josh had finished his thesis, so I had no excuse not to learn how to use Photoshop. With his help, I poked around, learned quite a few things and even managed to draw my turtle. He’s a derpy little guy but I consider him a small victory on my path to employment. Also he’s a wizard.

Update: Josh lent me his old Photoshop and InDesign textbooks from when he took the class. This learning thing has gotten much easier since then. :)


Update: I can use Photoshop! This is a happy day indeed. Now onto learning InDesign.