Doing It Rebel Style

Some house shots with my new Canon Rebel T3:

Purple Yam and a Canon Rebel

For the first time in four years, I spent Thanksgiving with my both my parents. And for the first time it was rather good. My mom cooked everything; I went there early to cook with her, but when I arrived, she had cooked everything already.  

 

Too much food for five people!

The purple dish is some Filipino yam. I had the ice cream version of it in high school at a Filipino friend's birthday, and I remember it tasting like buttered popcorn. 

This version didn't taste like it though, which is a tad disappointing but not disappointing at the same time. I saw it and kept raging that it was going to taste like popcorn, and then when I ate it, it was more on the sweeter side. It tastes better than buttered popcorn. 

I spent some time at home cleaning my closet (pictures TK) and then headed over to Alex's. His mom had made some Cajun-flavored turkey, which was super spicy. 

I ate dinner with them around actual dinner time, and then Alex and I headed to Target around 10 p.m. for this: 

It's the Canon Rebel T3. Alex bought it for me for Christmas and he let me have it early. 

We waited outside Target until it opened at midnight for Black Friday. There were maybe 100 or 125 people in front of us, because they were letting 20 people in at a time and it only took us 10 minutes. 

Getting the camera was somewhat of a bitch. The electronics line was all screwy because some of the barriers weren't established, so some people tried to cut in line. The atmosphere was a little chaotic, too, and of course, some people were acting crazy. Still, we were able to get a hold of one.

I'm super stoked.

It's charging right now. I didn't want to charge it overnight because it only needs two hours plugged into the wall, and I don't like to overcharge things.

If I don't get to do a photo session today, I'll eventually get to it. My mom just drove my dad to the hospital because his foot's been intensely hurting for the past week or two, and now he can barely walk on it. I'll update with that later.

A Rookie Who Breaks the News

This lack of article assignments is really taking a toll. I'm bored, and I feel lazy with nothing major in my schedule. Granted, I do have some chores to do, and I'll go for a run in the evening, but I figured I'd get my blog post out of the way first.

I broke two stories before three major news outlets Friday. The article in my last blog post about the woman who posed nude at a church? It was posted to the Lilburn Patch website Friday morning, and around 5 p.m. the same day, the same incident was reported on the AJC's website and on WSB-TV, both found here. It's not breaking news since it happened more than a week ago, so I'm fairly certain someone read my article and decided they should write about it, too.

The other story is a bit less exciting. For my last Meet the Owner column, I interviewed a lady who just opened Scentalicious, a soy candle shop in Stone Mountain Village. It posted Friday at 12:01 a.m. on the Stone Mountain Patch. Around 10:30 p.m., I got an email from the owner saying CBS Atlanta saw my article and went over to shoot a story for the 11 p.m. news. (Unfortunately, there's no direct link for the video.)

And yesterday, I changed my nail color again. Commander in Chic by Sally Hansen.

I love it. I just hope it doesn't chip as badly as the Gray by Gray.

Posing Nude Near a Church

You just can't make this stuff up. Here's another article posted today on the Lilburn Patch. It's one of my favorites in a while:

The Buddy Christ from "Dogma," via Wikipedia

Expanding a nude portfolio: A woman and man were arrested near a Lilburn church when Gwinnett police officers found the man taking nude photos of the woman. The two eventually explained that they were taking the photos to expand her portfolio because she wanted to pursue a career as an exotic dancer. Check it out here.

Friendsgiving is tomorrow! That occasion is pretty self explanatory, right? I'll try to take photos.

Patch: Inside the Police Blotter

I am super bored. Here some articles of mine that were posted last week.

Credit: Teqnoqolor via Deviantart

Wrong delivery: On Halloween night in Norcross, a group of kids opens the door to a man dressed in a Dominos outfit, complete with a pizza box. After establishing that no one at the residence had ordered pizza, the delivery man pulls a gun on them and brings out two other guys for a robbery. Read the rest of the home invasion here.

Credit: jenny downing via Flickr

You just got forked: A 53-year-old Lilburn woman stabs her husband in the arm and groin after calling her a bitch. Twice. Check out the aggravated assault incident here in detail.

Nail Polish Was on Sale.

My weekend was blah. Two days of visitations, funerals and hopping from state to state are not fun.

On Thursday before the trip, I went into Walgreen's to buy some nail polish remover and one bottle of Essie. Yeah, that didn't happen.

Nail polish was on sale. I bought it all.

And by "all," I mean "five." But I definitely wanted to buy them all.

I originally put on Sally Hansen's Gray by Gray (second from the right). In the store, it looked like a bluish gray, but when I put it on, it ended up just looking ugly.

It's super disappointing because I love the color gray. However, I didn't like this particular shade for some reason. It's odd because I usually put on gray if I'm indecisive on choosing my weekly color.

I couldn't wait to change it, especially since Hampton Inn's walls fucked up my nails when I was out of town. Their walls are covered with some hard, caulky crap. I can't really describe it since I don't know construction jargon, but it looks like the same material used to add depth ceilings. (To me, the ceiling design looks like somebody used a paintball to make it.

Anyway, the walls looks nice, but it's so disastrous on my nails that the slightest contact scraped the polish right off. That's never happened before, not even while washing dishes.

So once I got back, I changed the color to Rimmel London's Wild Orchid (second from left). It's actually not bad, but not my favorite.

I tried the cooking spray trick for the first time, and so far, it seems to be working. I'll have a verdict after I sleep on it, since oftentimes I wake up to dents and impressions from my pillow.

On another note, I need more scarves.

I want to try out of all these.

We Are Journalists.

An impromptu trip to Tennessee awaits me for the weekend. Alex's grandmother died yesterday morning, so we're heading up there for the funeral.

Hopefully I'll take some pretty pictures of the autumn leaves.

Anyway, I stumbled upon this nifty place yesterday: We Are Journalists.

It's a Tumblr of editors, reporters, copy editors, page designers, bloggers and other journalists. Each one writes a short blurb on how being a journalist is completely worth the shitty moments of being paid less, having unhappy comments spat at you, the sleepless nights and everything else in between.

Reading each one makes me proud and sad at the same time. If I wasn't uber afraid of my career before, this just confirmed it. But goddamn, I love what I do.

Here's my attempt to writing one, photo TK:

My commute consists of walking from my bed to my couch. I live off my MacBook Pro and my shitty iPhone 3G for emails from my editors. I completed five internships, four of them unpaid, before landing a freelance gig with my current employer. I still work for free with a publication just so that I can add two extra lines to my resume. AP style is my lifestyle. I've interviewed celebrities, business owners and educators, and I've gotten tons of free shit just because I'm in the media. After all of that, I still feel the most prideful when thinking about my article involving a local hero who had the balls to chase a group of bank robbers for ten miles in his own truck.

Despite my recent pay cut and all the criticism thrown my way, he is the reason why I'm still attempting to make it in this industry.

I am a freelance journalist.

--

I also felt like I needed to say this, too, but I couldn't find a way to incorporate it with the graf above:

I was a sales rep for an inbound call center making decent moolah until the company closed two and a half years ago. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, because if the company didn't close, I would probably still be there, still hating the job but doing it because of the money. I love what I do, and even though I'm not making as much as I did with my old job, I'm definitely not reprinting a resignation letter every week anymore.

I'm a freelance journalist.