What Now

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Now that I'm fairly established as the "Friendly Neighborhood Sign Lady" (and yes, I sign emails that way when sending something out en masse) I am given a bit more leeway to do different things with my special event signage. The standard signs are white, with red and blue borders, a SpRocket logo at the top and "welcomes" the name or logo of the group having the event. However, since we've built the Davidson Center, we are getting more things like wedding receptions and rehearsal dinners and a lot of our guests want signs that match their wedding colors or invitations or whatever. That probably would have been a no-go at some point, but now that we are hurting for money, people who pay get what they want! :) I like doing the wedding and rehearsal dinner signs because it gives me a chance to do a bit more design work than usual and I get to use fonts other than Helvetica Black. Occasionally I get a request for an culturally specific event that I'm completely clueless about, so I have to be very careful about colors or symbols or whatever. Yesterday I got a request for a sign for something called a Simcha, which the internet tells me is a Jewish celebration that can be for anything. I am not Jewish and I know all of one Jewish person (and as far as I know, she is from a Jewish family but doesn't follow the lifestyle). Ergo, I was lost. At any rate, since it was for a rehearsal dinner, I knew I didn't have to be too specific with traditions, even if I did want to be sensitive about their traditions. So, I researched and downloaded things and did a lot of rearranging and starting over until I had what I believed was both appropriate and pretty. Then I checked to see what wording was requested for the sign and it said "Shalom, Y'all". I kid you not. I was not aware that we had Jewish rednecks in Huntsville, or anywhere else in the world, but there you go. You learn something new everyday. SIGH.

2) I watched a very scary movie on YouTube yesterday! Normally I can watch scary movies and they don't bother me, but this one was freaky. It's called [REC] and it's basically the Spanish-language original that the movie "Quarantine" is based on. Steve hates horror movies, so I knew I'd have to wait until it came out on DVD before I'd get a chance to see Quarantine, so I decided to watch the original with the subtitles. If you like scary movies, I suggest you watch this one (you can find it on Google Video, too). It's very claustrophobic and freaky. I watched it during my lunch break yesterday and I was listening to it with my earphones in. There were a lot of jump-out-at-you moments, so I can only imagine the sounds coming from my office: silence then "AHHH!" more silence then "NOOO!" It was the kind of movie that made it hard for me to sleep, so it must have been scary. The only other movie that does that to me is The Exorcist, and I refuse to watch that one ever again.

3) My voice is almost gone. I ran out of allergy meds on the same day that I had to replace a sign outside. The sign is planted in a built up flower bed that is about waist high on me and the flowers poked me in the face the whole time. I have been fighting my body's urge to get any worse, and I even bought the kind of allergy medicine that you have to get by giving a DNA sample and 8 forms of identification to the pharmacy. If I but anything else with pseudoephedrine in it in the next couple of days, the FBI will come and cart me off. I'm on their Meth watch list now, I suppose. Of course, we also have the nice cough syrup that Steve got the last time his allergies were acting up, so I take that too. It makes me all warm and tingly. DARN POLLEN. It's freaking October! Go away already!