Tvindy

The Wedding Date(s)

It's hard to believe I've been in Brazil for two months now and still don't have an exact wedding date. The bureaucracy here is truly astonishing. On December 5th, we will have completed our 45-day waiting period and can then set a date (assuming the marriage is approved). Since marriages can only be performed on Wednesdays and Fridays, we're shooting for Dec. 7th, but we don't know if we can get that day at the last minute. Therefore Dec. 12 and Dec. 14 are our backup dates. If anyone wishes to attend, just hop a plane to Belo Horizonte, Brazil and stay from at least as early as Dec. 7th to at least the 14th, and you can see the wedding.

Any readers of this blog are welcome to attend, but I would especially like to invite the following from my blogroll:

• Bakerina: She could bring Lloyd, and it would be a pleasure to take them around and expose them to the unique cuisine of Brazil. Also, Bakerina could bake us a fabulous wedding cake.
• Bill Stevenson: He will freak out when he sees that the iPod Shuffle goes for nearly $200 in Brazil.
• Jenny and Geoff: They're already in the southern hemisphere, so it would be a quick and easy trip for them.
• Michael Moore: (No, not the Michael Moore.) He could bring the whole family, and the trip would give him and his daughter something to blog about. Apparently nothing blogworthy has happened in their lives since July.
• 'mouse: He's a lawyer. My fiancée is a lawyer. They can talk about lawyering stuff.
• orionoir: I'd love to see the pictures he'd take around here. (But I shudder to think of the adventures he'd wind up having in Brazil!)
• Snow: She really really needs a vacation!
• Teka: She already speaks Portuguese. This would be a great opportunity for her to show James around Brazil.
• Will: He's never been abroad and needs to see the world. Plus we could put together at least a few truly awesome podcast episodes, perhaps even reviving The Dynamite Coalition.

Anyone on the above list is welcome and would have a place to stay if they came. (That is unless they all end up coming, in which case I am screwed.)

Tweaking

I may not be posting, but for some reason today I was motivated to do a bit of tweaking. I guess I was getting tired of the old banner, so I put up a new one.

Modern Portuguese Tilework

Portugal for Kids

This was taken at Portugal dos Pequenitos, which is a sort of outdoor museum/amusement park of miniaturized works of Portuguese architecture on which children can amuse themselves.

When Bloggers Meet

Greetings, oh readers of Tvindy! It is I,Snowball, and I come to you from having just spent a lovely morning dining with our very own host, Tvindy.

His trip appears to be going marvelously well. He plunked himself down in Cheyenne, WY yesterday morning and got lots of rest in order to continue the remainder of his journey. I slowed him down a bit by making him wait until I had a shower and drove northward to Cheyenne this morning. I'm so glad to have provided a delay in his trip. Honestly, I would have spent the whole day talking to him if hadn't needed to be in Oregon tomorrow.

Tvindy is a charming gentleman, and if you ever have the chance to get to meet him, you certainly won't be sorry you did. He's smart, he's funny, and he's an all-around great guy. He should have let me pay for breakfast, though, since he's a starving student.

(Thank you for helping me figure out where I'd gone wrong, Bakerina. I didn't realize there was a draft status down there, which is what I get for using ecto, although I think it's superior to the standard interface.)

Last Call for Guest Bloggers

So far I've got two people signed up to guest blog while I am on the road and during my first week of classes at the U of O. One of them is Bakerina and the other is someone who has chosen the alias "Buttercup Hamsterchunks", so I'm not sure if I'm supposed to reveal who that is. (It's someone from my blogroll.) Anyone else? Please let me know in the next 48 hours.

New Blogroll

I put up a new blogroll today. You'll see it in the right column under "My Readers". It's entitled "Good Stuff". These are the blogs that I really like, and most of them are much better than my own humble blog. I'm very excited; now all I have to do is click on the links to go visit them rather than hunt for them all the time in my bookmarks. I wish I had thought of this earlier. Anyway, check 'em out. They're good reading.

State of the Blog Address

Yes, I know. This blog is a mess. Since I went from two to three columns, the page banner is now too narrow and needs to be redesigned, and the layout is a mess. The categories have also gotten out of control.

Moving to Oregon has also been hard on the poor blog. I was unable to maintain my perfect unbroken record of a post a day. Perhaps more serious is the fact that my posting schedule, which worked so well for me in Muncie, will not work here. I cannot post old photos, because I left all my albums and negatives in Muncie. I don't have much more in the way of old creative works to put up. And taking pictures here is difficult, since it is always raining. (And then there's the fact that I'm incredibly busy.)

Truly Tvindy has entered the Dark Ages. But I sense a Renaissance up ahead. Things should gradually improve over the coming weeks as I slowly redefine my life and my blog. From here on out things can only get better.

On the Road

Well, I'm on the road now. Actually, I've been driving since early yesterday, but thanks to the miracle of the prescheduling feature of Typepad, I can appear to be at the computer while away.

If all goes well, I will be in Eugene, Oregon with my computer hooked up within the week. In the meantime, I hope I'm taking some really good travel pics.

What I Read in 2003

Since I started this blog, I've been keeping a typelist of everything I've read. The list doesn't go back all the way to the beginning of the year, but for anyone who's interested it shows the last twelve books I finished in 2003.

Since I've been meaning to switch over to the three-column view for some time, and I know of no way to publish a typelist within a post, I'll just start the extra column with the list of books (seen on the left) and then reorganize my blog over the next few days. Sorry for the mess.

Site FAQ

I haven't been at this long enough to have a huge following of hundreds of people stopping by every week. (I probably never will.) So I don't get many questions about this site. Nevertheless, there are a several things I haven't yet explained about myself or this site that probably should be addressed, hence my very own FAQ. (If I were really daring, I'd try my hand at the Proust Questions, but I'm not.)

What is your gender?

I guess that's not very clear from my name or anything I've written thus far. I am male.

How old are you?

I'm much older than I would like to admit. When people first meet me they usually think that I am quite a bit younger than I really am. I am also extremely immature for my age.

What kind of camera do you use to take all those pictures?

I use a Fuji FinePix A303 digital camera with 3.2 megapixels. I would highly recommend it for anyone looking to buy a good low-end, easy-to-use digital camera that takes nice pictures.

What did you study in college?

I majored in French and minored in German. Yet for very complex reasons, my best language is Portuguese. I also know some Spanish and tiny amounts of Danish, Romanian and Latin. So let's just say I studied "languages".

How did you choose the background color for your blog?

A few years ago I was setting up a page with a lot of photos, and I had a little javascript program that let me scroll through a dropdown menu of more than 40 background colors, allowing me to quickly see how the page looked with each one. The one that worked best in terms of not clashing with any of the photos and, in many cases, actually complementing their colors, was the one I use on this site. The HEX code is #800000.

Can you put me on your blogroll?

I put people on my blogroll who have left a comment and have visited my site on more than one occasion. If you are reading this, then you are already halfway there.

What is the focus of your blog?

The focus is not to have a focus. I realized when I created this blog that I would not be happy with a specific focus, so I decided to concentrate instead on covering as wide a set of topics as possible, and I am proud to say that I have posts here for every single default category of Typepad. I suspect that I will eventually become more specialized as I exhaust certain categories and find my strength in others. Already, I seem to be posting a disproportionately high number of entries relating to apes. I have no idea why, though. (I sure hope this doesn't end up morphing into an ape blog.)

So, you live in Muncie, Indiana. Is there anything interesting about that place that you might like to share with us?

Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, is from here and still resides here. David Letterman went to school at the local university (Ball State).

My First Post

Hello and welcome to my new blog! Since this is my first post, it's just a test entry. Better content will follow shortly. Stay tuned . . . .