Sleepless In Anaheim

Okay, I don't get it. It's 4 am and I am wide awake. I'd have thought that I'd be sleeping like a log tonight, I stayed up way too late both Tues and Weds nights, then Fri (about midnight, eek!), and Saturday nite I stayed up until 1 am, yikes! Not doing anything special, just procrastinating on going to bed. And I slept in until noon yesterday, and could barely keep my eyes open the rest of the day, went to bed at 10 pm, and now here I am awake at 4 am. I don't get it.

Maybe this is caused by the fact that I did stay up so late so many days? Maybe the Calzone with nearly a half a block of cheese in it (mozzarella, ricotta, romano plus ham, mushrooms & tomatos) that I ate for dinner at 8 pm has something to do with it? That is so much more cheese than I've eaten in years! And now it's just sitting in my stomach, not digesting, I can feel it. Maybe the fact that the muscles in the right side of my neck & shoulder are knotted and feel strained, and no amount of self-massage seems to help has something to do with it. Whatever, I'm up, and it sucks since I have to work tomorrow...um, today. I guess I'll have to wait for the sleeping crash that I know is coming.

So anyhow, since I'm up, I'll write about yesterday. I went to Circuit City to check out camcorders, and I got a little bit discouraged since none of the college-aged sales guys seemed interested in giving me any more info about any of the cameras beyond the questions that I asked. Each simply stood there looking bored, "Can I go help someone else now?" implied in their attitudes. Little did they know I had my gift money in my pocket to buy with if they had taken the time to pay attention to me and actually sell me. I learned that HDD (recording direct to hard-drive--pure digital, like a digital camera or an i-Pod) would be the very best type of Camcorder to get for my purposes, but that is currently out of my price range, so a DV (mini-video cassette) is the next best choice. I also learned that while Canon is the best brand for still photography, Sony & Panasonic apparently are the brands to go with for camcorders. Sony has the best low-light filming capabilities, which is definitely something for me to consider since there may be plenty of times that I'll be filming by lamp-light alone, no fancy professional lights. But I'm still sold on Canon by the description I read on Amazon.com...now I'm torn.

But another thing that discouraged me a bit is it turns out that the editing software & tripod are a separate expense from the camera itself. Which I kind of knew already, but I actually got to price tripods and get an idea of how much the software will cost. And I only have enough $$ for the camcorder itself. So I figure I can do without the tripod for the time being (ack!), and plan on visiting E-Bay to try and find the Incredible Deal of... getting the camcorder and editing software for the same amount of money that I'd get just the camcorder for in the stores. Wish me luck!

After Circuit City, I went to my sister's house all the way out in Riverside (45 minute drive) to work on my headshots for the second time around. Her room-mate (who I shall call Richy--not his real name, obviously) who's computer I'd be using was home, thank God, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten very far with Adobe Photoshop, not because I couldn't figure the program out--which I might not have been able to do such a good job touching up my photos etc if he hadn't been home--but because he has a track ball mouse on his computer. And it turns out I wasn't able to do anything with the stupid track ball except point and click. I couldn't even pick up the stupid picture and move it. So we started out with him helping me make the raw 8x12 image into an 8x10, giving me a few pointers on how to touch up the fly-away hairs using the stamp tool, (Which was AWESOME, so much better than the spray painting I'd tried to do with stupid Windows Paint, even though I felt I'd done the best job possible with the tools I'd had available, constantly picking up the background color just next to the hair with the Eye Dropper tool, then painting over the hair, then spray painting to blend the edges. With the Stamp tool in Photoshop, you can't even tell the hair has been removed, it pastes an exact copy of the area right next to the hair, and the crosshairs showing where the copy is being picked up from moves with the paste circle so that the copy always matches the area next to the hair. The blending is seemless! And for those little areas where the blending wasn't entirely seemless, I discovered the BandAid tool, which smoothed everything out, blended the colors together so it looked like just another out of focus part of the background, it was AWESOME!!) Richy also showed me how to make a border on my picture if I wanted it, then he found a regular mouse for me to use instead, and let me have at it. So I started working on my photo (yes, folks, just one photo) at about 3 pm I guess, and first I adjusted the cropping of the 8x10 without any border, put a small strip of white all the way across the bottom of the photo with my name, then touched up the fly-away hairs, and even removed the faint coloring of lipstick from my teeth without loosing the...teeth's?...tooths's...? -- their natural color. But looking at the final edited 8x10 on the screen, the cropping wasn't much different from the photos I've just gotten: Too close to use.

Then I noticed one of the other edits Richy had saved with a border around the picture seemed to allow more of the picture within the border, not nearly as tight cropping. I don't understand why having a border gives you more wiggle room on how much of the picture is included, but apparently this is the case. So after spending over an hour working with the no-borders version, touching it up, I decided to start over and give my headshot a border. I found a Grid Tool that I used to make sure the border was exactly equal on all sides of the photo except for the bottom which was a touch bigger for my name, which is done by a combination of cropping away the parts of the photo you don't want, and locking the proportions and stretching the picture to the right size. I also used the Grid Tool to align my name perfectly between the top edge and bottom edge of the border, and used the text box itself to center the text from side to side. And then, I had to go back and edit out the fly-away hairs and the lipstick on my teeth AGAIN. (Note to self: Next time, edit the fly-aways FIRST, save that as a new file, and THEN start manipulating the picture for cropping, border, etc. That way I'll only have to edit the fly-aways once!)

So then I uploaded the picture to Shutterfly, and placed my order. YAY! But since I was tired and not paying attention, I ordered glossy prints instead of matte, damn it. *sigh*. But the order is placed, I know my headshots will be usuable this time, I should have them by the end of the week.

By this time it was nearly 7:30 pm, and neither Richy nor I had eaten dinner yet, so we went to dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant, which is where the Calzone at 8 pm comes in. And just to clear the air and put a stop to any gossip or speculation before it starts, Richy has a girlfriend whom he is devoted to, but he's been a close friend of the family for many many years, and is one of my sister's best friends.

And now it is 5:11 am, so I guess I'll try sleeping again. Happy Monday, all!

P.S. I've decided that I was taking Katherine McPhee's song Open Toes waaaaaay too seriously, and the song has really grown on me since last week. I can get into knowing how to look cute to get a guy's attention, and for the first time in my life, I really really want a pair of open-toed shoes. My shoe buying selections are very limited because I have extra wide feet. Not just wide, but extra wide. So usually I just wear sneakers. There is a wide width shoe store near by, but most of the time I cannot afford to buy shoes there. :-(

I need to make more money! There, put that out into the Universe.