Stepping Out

Yesterday we went down to Oklahoma City with some friends and spent time at an honest-to-goodness art museum. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I have been to an art museum, and most of those were at the Sheldon Art Gallery in Lincoln. It's not that I don't like going, it's that art museums don't really enter into my daily consciousness. So when a friend of ours asked if we wanted to go see the Dutch Italianates exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, we both thought it would be something fun and different, so we decided to give it a shot.

And you know what? It was pretty cool. I don't know Monet from Manet, or Impressionism from Surrealism, but I did have a good time looking at all the (very old) paintings, probably because they were all nature scenes. We took out time, reading all the descriptions and even trying to dig a little deeper into the meaning of some of the paintings. Mostly I just liked how the artists were able to create such vivid nature scenes, including animals and people, with nothing but a paintbrush. Today these kinds of things could be banged out in no time in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet, but those artists had nothing but unadulterated skill and tenacity--no computer sketching, no Google image searching, and no [undo] button.

We also spent time looking at the rest of the museum, and even though I didn't really get some of it (a giant blue square with an orange stripe down the middle, a small red square matted inside a frame...do people really pay for this stuff?) it was different and interesting, so that was nice. They also had dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of works from a guy who is famous for glass creations. A lot of it was blown glass, and in the lobby there was a tower made of hundreds of pieces of blown glass that stretched nearly three stories high. With all due respect to the dutch artists, the glass was definitely my favorite. :)

One of the cool things about living in our own house has been putting things together in such a way that the house feels like a home. From mowing the yard to decorating the walls, rearranging furniture, and even buying a few things here and there, it's nice to watch this place come together. This week we should be receiving a mounting bracket for our TV, which means we will get to rearrange the whole living room, and I'm looking forward to it. One more step that makes this a place we really feel like we live in.

Time to get working on my review of A Christmas Story for Walking Taco, and the it's off to church. Aw yeah.

HD-Whawha?

Tonight my wife and I might finally take the plunge, if time permits: we will go out and buy one of those digital converter boxes for our TV. Until now this hasn't really been a priority, since we watch about four hours of over-the-airwaves TV per year in our house (no kidding), but with the February deadline looming closer every day, we though it was high time to join the party, albeit a tad late.

We ordered our coupons a few weeks ago, and they got here yesterday, so tonight after running a few errands we will probably head to Best Buy, Circuit City, or another similar place, and snag a converter box. Not that we'll use it much, but it will be nice to be prepared at any rate.

Three weeks ago the two of us went to a "tent sale" put on by National Camera, a local camera outlet, and purchased some nice schwag to boost the quality of our wedding videos--two tripod heads, one set of tripod legs, a camera bag, some lens filters, and, the pièce de résistance, a new Sony HC96 camera. Well, "new" as in "open-box item." Since we already have one HC96, and like it so much, we bought another so the secondary camera in the weddings we record is now of equal quality to the primary. Anyway, the one we bought, unfortunately, did not work, so I took it back the next day for warranty service. Sadly, they told me it would be at least a month until they could fix it, but lo and behold, last night they called and said it was fixed and ready to be picked up. Sweet! It's possible they were pulling a Scotty and just over-estimating from the get-go, but in either case it's nice to have our new camera up and working.

Time to finish up my root beer and get back to some schoolwork...