Of the two rose bushes , the one on the left bloomed first. Seven or eight roses, all at once. The one on the right, meanwhile, only had one bud on it. It finally bloomed as the roses on the left bush were starting to fall apart.

I named it. It was the Last Rose. I greeted it each time I came in or walked out the door. And it was my favorite part of the apartment, especially since that was the week my Internet died.

I wrote the relevant blog post on a Sunday. I lost service the previous Tuesday and didn’t get it back until the following Thursday. Given the fact that the service box was about 300 feet from the Internet Service Provider’s service building, which itself is located right next to my apartment complex, needless to say I’m slightly bitter about the fact that it took so long and so many phone calls to finally get it fixed.

Wednesday was the worst day. By this point I was convinced that I would never get the Internet back and I was going to die a crazy cat lady, alone and unloved. (If something’s going wrong for longer than expected, I have a slight tendency to imagine the absolute worst, whether related to the current situation or not.) This was conviction was strengthened when I looked in the rearview mirror as I pulled into my carport and realized the Last Rose was gone.

It had seemed strong that morning. Definitely starting to wilt, but I didn’t expect it to be…gone.

There is a life cycle, and part of this cycle is death.

Things break.

I absolutely love it. It’s plain, simple, and perfect.

There were other things I was going to write, but I’m tired and having image uploading issues. Suffice it to say, if I’m not completely lazy, there will be changes around here (including, hopefully, an increase in the frequency of posts).

Keynote, to the unaware, is an excellent presentation program. It’s part of iWork, which is Apple’s answer to Microsoft Office. Keynote is the parallel to PowerPoint. In fact, it’s *better* than PowerPoint (though to be fair, I haven’t had a chance to experiment with PowerPoint 2008).

And yet: PowerPoint wins, I argue, because Microsoft makes Office for Macs.

Seriously. Keynote is great. Why can’t Apple make it for Windows machines? To force people to buy their computers? Wouldn’t their software stand a better chance of competing against Office if they were cross-platform?

I just wish the process of designing was as well.

5-14 Inches of White Stuff Dumped on Area

“White Stuff”? So, what, cocaine is now falling from the sky? Or feathers? Or manna? Your colloquilisms are forgivable in speech, not the newspaper.

Horse Put Down After Carriage Hit By Car

This one doesn’t sound that bad. It’s concise, right? But the problem with this one is the rhetoric–this puts the HORSE’s death as the most important component of the accident–the only thing that made the event newsworthy, in fact. Which it may very well be; I think most accidents are reported as news only if there’s a death involved. But this headline puts the animal component above the human component. A horse’s life is not more important than a human’s.

So, really, newspapers, if you want to survive the digital age, stop making headlines that read like they’ve come off Twitter.

I created this image in Illustrator, using this tutorial as a guide. Not bad, considering it’s the first thing I’ve ever done in Illustrator, unless you count me using it to trace images to create my banners.

Honestly, I think I’m more surprised he didn’t suggest giving away Alaska instead.

What gets me isn’t that there was yet another murder in Lansing, though of course that’s horrible, or even that, as always, the victim was “such a nice boy.” (This is a commentary for another day, but dead people are always portrayed as saints. I’m sure this guy was nice, but c’mon, are drug dealers never killed like this? “Man, it sucks that Bob got shot, but I’m so not surprised. Dude was always totally wasted and picking fights.” Makes me wish we were operating under the Speaker for the Dead model.)

No–the thing that got me was this quote:

“These kids,” she added, with sadness coming into her voice, “they can’t just settle things with their fists. When you shoot somebody, they don’t come back. It affects the family. It affects the neighborhood.”

What about settling things with words? If you’ve got violent tendencies, take them out on video games or at the gym, people. I like to chop veggies when I’m angry or stressed–it turns the energy into something productive (and tasty). Fistfights are still acts of violence, and even if there’s a legitimate reason for the violence, there are better ways to pursue justice.