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Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Why, here I am!

I must confess: I miss blogging. So here I am. I have no idea if I'll be able to maintain this at all, what with school and homeschooling and all the other gazillion things I usually have on my plate, but I want to. I'm not where I was (maybe someday I'll import [most of] those posts, if I stick around here, that is), because my domain name is about to expire and I don't think I'll renew it. Or maybe I will, and I'll import these posts. Or maybe I'll have a new domain name. I am an unpredictable, indecisive person: move over, Philippa Gordon, and if you haven't read Anne of the Island now is a good time to do that, by the way.

So. I have a few projects in mind for this blog, aside from the usual* book reviews and self-deprecating humor and garden posts and chicken posts and canning posts (I have seeds! and two new canning cookbooks! squee!) and photographs and school-related posts and maybe even some mind-numbingly dull exercise stuff, since (prepare yourself for a shock) I do that now -- exercise -- and everyone who does it likes to talk about it even though anything short of training for a marathon is pretty darn boring as a discussion topic, really. *if you can call anything "usual" when I haven't done it with any regularity in about fourteen months, right?

The first project is a live-blogging one with Katie: We share a love/hate relationship with Jodi Picoult's writing, and so we are going to read her new book, House Rules, which was just released today, and snark about it objectively review it, complete with predictions for the inevitable Picoult-patented Cheap-Shot Plot Twist (TM) and anything else we feel like snarking about rationally discussing along the way. Other projects to come may or may not involve scary 1970's food and Little House on the Prairie (not, it is to be hoped, simultaneously). Stay tuned.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

I think I'll put this one right *there*. Hey, where's all this water coming from?

I've just spent half an hour or so updating my blog's stylesheet, which was a waste of time on a level somewhere between "hours of Tetris" and "rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship", but the simple fact was oh my GOSH those colors were ugly. And now they're not, and my soul feels just that much more restful knowing that this is so.

There's been so, so, so much happening that I couldn't possibly decide where to start, so it's a good thing you all are on Twitter and Facebook with me and I don't even need this blog anymore, right?

A related poll: Would you hate it and never come back here if I started posting my Twitter posts at the end of each day? I've seen other people do this, and I've thought of it myself for archiving purposes, especially since almost nobody comes here anymore anyway. If I were to do it I would try to expand a bit on some of the juicier tweets (hey, at least it's a prettier word than "blog"), partly because I wish I could at Twitter and partly because it would make for extra content for people who see my twitter feed anyway, and partly because when I'm sixty and I pull up my old blog on my, I dunno, two-way eyeglass telescreen, I will have forgotten all the backstory for every tweet I ever wrote. (That doesn't actually have to wait 25 years, to be honest.). It could be fun. Or lame and off-putting, either one.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

So, um, hi.

In case you were wondering (you probably weren't, you probably hadn't even really noticed my absence, but I'm allowed to have a few fantasies here, right?), I actually was planning on abandoning my blog for good, but then I changed my mind. (This is the part where you pretend to sigh in relief, instead of dismay, to make me feel better. Thank you.) The reasons I changed my mind were (ooh goody! a list!):

1. I like reviewing the books I read, so as to have a record for myself, but I won't do it unless I have a place where other people might see the reviews. I'm narcissistic that way, I guess.

2. Also, to whom would I brag about my garden this spring, if not to my loyal blogging public? (P.S. I HAVE SEEDS! A whole bag of seeds! Spring can't stay away forever!)

3. Also also, I missed everyone. Yes, I know "everyone" is something on the order of ten people, but I missed communicating with you (yes, you!) for the almost-month that I was no longer a blogger. Even the commentless posts felt like conversations. And that's as soppy as I'm going to get about the whole thing, so you don't need to run away in fear of more goopy sentiment.

4. Further also, Facebook just isn't the same, and Twitter's not quite enough. Not that I won't post stuff there too, but I was wrong when I thought I would be just as happy without a blog since I had those two outlets.

5. Further further also, I guess #1 can be expanded to include life in general. I'm amazed how often I look back on my old blog posts and have a wonderful time reading and remembering about stuff I had completely forgotten, and which never would have written down if it were only for myself to read. So basically, I have to allow myself the illusion that someone else might find my thoughts interesting before I record them, even if I'm really recording them for myself. Is there a name for this particular psychological disorder?
   

The thing is, I'm so out of the habit of using this thing on a regular basis, and I have a whole lot more going on on a day-to-day basis than I did when I used to post every day. (Sometimes, early on, more than once a day. Really! People do that! Remember when it was once a day and twice on Sunday? Where'd that kind of spark go? What? I'm talking about blogging!) I have actual stuff that I have to write for actual grades, and I have an actual garden (well, seasonally - although I am so putting in cold frames for lettuce and broccoli. What's the use of living in California if you can't take advantage of the relatively mild winters?), and actual children who don't generally like being blog fodder, and I do try to keep my house from looking as if a thrift shop had exploded in the front room, which was, I must admit, not always the case. But I'm going to try to make time to post with some semblance of regularity. In fact, for the month of February, I'm going to try to post every day. Hey, it's a short month; you never know; I might actually make it. I won't make any drastic no-memes promises, though. I may need to cheat now and then.

So. Today is a boring metapost, but tomorrow I'll try to write about my books for December and January -- the ones I can remember, anyway. And surely I'll have come up with something else by Tuesday. I hope?

Saturday, February 02, 2008

test post

Back in the early days of my Internet experience, my primary focus was on e-mail lists. This was, believe it or not, before there was any such thing as Yahoo Groups. I was on several lists covering different topics, and frequently a person would want to bounce a post off the majordomo software to make sure that they were still subscribed, so there would be a post that came through to EVERYONE ON THE LIST that just said "test post. seeing if I'm still subscribed." I always thought, geesh, people, what is up with pestering us all with that? Could you not come up with any content? Even just a little?

Like, say, this scintillating content. Test post! Just seeing if my feed-reader is on crack or not.

OK, ok, ok, content. Um. We are now hopelessly addicted to jibjab.com! There's more snow coming tonight and tomorrow, which makes me want to scream! I desperately need to go to the valley to buy groceries and would like to take the whole family but can't! Because last night while we were gone for twenty minutes Scout completely wrecked some of the curtains I had slaved over so patiently not three weeks ago! So today I am buying a crate! Because everyone recommends using a crate for her if we are gone for short times! Because it's better than an outside run in this nasty snowy weather! And she will dig right out of our nicely fenced yard, it turns out! And because we are not generally gone for all day at a time!

Seriously, the crate will address the symptoms of the separation anxiety that has caused Scout to, in the short space of a week and about four brief absences, do the following:

• unplug and then chew -- I presume in that order -- the cord of the lamp by our door
• tear up the aforementioned curtains
• pee on the couch, because she stands on it to watch us leave and presumably whine and fall to pieces as we drive out of sight. Yay for super excellent odor-removing stain-removing upholstery cleaners.
• poop on the couch (ditto.)
• poop on the floor.
• get up onto the counter
• twice. Once she knocked over a full go-cup of cold coffee, and the other time she
• drank some (very little) cooking oil that was sitting there cold in a pan and then puked on the floor
• twice, and only once was on the easy-clean laminate flooring.

... but I have no clue what to do for the problem itself. Anyone? Anyone? I'm beginning to get a glimpse of an idea as to why Scout may have been abandoned. Not that I even think of doing that, but it might not have been just that someone was moving into an apartment where they couldn't have a dog, which had been my previous assumption, because this is one very nice friendly dog with, as far as I can tell, no faults. Except that apparently she requires absolutely constant human companionship (we tried a little experiment yesterday with Roman and it was a dismal failure, so T is spared any further pestering for a second dog) or she goes completely bananas. Poor thing. Poor us.

Friday, November 02, 2007

I can't believe I'm doing this.

This is November, which means that NaNoWriMo is in full swing. (That's a link, for those of you who have just discovered the Internet within the last eleven months.) And no, I'm not that crazy. I am crazy enough, though, that I've decided that during the month of November I will post every single day in my blog. After all, I pay for the darn thing*; I might as well use it. Besides, it might be nice to do a little writing when I don't have to worry about Tight Paragraphing and Citing Sources and all those very important English 01A kinds of things.

That sound I am hearing is people rushing to their RSS feed-readers and scrambling for the DELETE button.

So, um. A post.

I am so everlastingly tired of the whole home-buying thing but I'll do a short update. No, They(tm) haven't taken back their statement about how escrow must close by, egads, this Monday, isn't it. Our lender and our agent are just figuring (hoping?) that by continuing to make progress and demonstrating such to the seller's bank or whoever it is, we'll mollify their angry, impatient little bankerish selves (who, hello, are the ones who dragged this thing out for four months for no reason that anyone can discern) and they'll let us proceed. So we'll know more in, eh, three days or so, how that went. If you hear a primal scream followed by a medium-sized explosion on Monday afternoon from the general direction of California, you'll know why.

Living with Mom and Dad is going very, very well. We all like it so much that it's a good thing we're already roped into buying a house, because otherwise we might just keep mooching off my parents for years. Everyone without exception in the outside world (at least it seems this way) assumes that we all can't wait to be out of each other's hair, but we're actually pretty sad about the fact that we'll only be here for maybe another month or six weeks. Unless, of course, They(tm) dump us on our sorry behinds and we have to start that whole process over again at day one, in which case, hey, spring wildflowers are just awesome out here.

*actually, if it weren't for the fact that my husband's car-restoration blog, whose URL is Very Important to him, is a subdomain attached to this one, I'd have pitched the whole thing and gone back to blogspot months and months ago.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

oops

blank page: (n) 1. what your journal becomes when you're a lazy blogger and never post. 2. what your journal becomes when you're a person who has some stuff going on that you don't want to broadcast to the world because you're not sure who reads your blog. 3. proof that maybe I'm a little bit over the whole blog thing, at least for this week.

Really I can't think of anything right now. I was going to do a full-on filler post but I'll spare you. Maybe I'll come back later with some actual substance.

OK, just ONE wee little list.

1. T's still off, getting a lot better, though, and will probably be going back to work in a week and a half (boo hoo!)
2. There's some awesome stuff going on with my friends. Jennifer is a NEW PERSON (woo hoo!) and Kristen is carrying a new person inside her (woo hoo!), both of which are things I've been praying about for a long time. Y'all, God is awesome. Did I just say y'all? It must be genetic.
3. We are all fine, dandy, kids are growing, blah blah blah.
4. However, our cars are not. Fine, that is. They are both broken in various ways. Only the truck is working spot-on and since it costs like 30c a mile to drive the truck we don't. Yay for parents who will lend $25,000 machines to their child as necessary, even though said child may or may not have incurred minor damage to their $25,000 machine in the far-distant past, like say in 1992.
5. It was like 45 degrees this morning. Which is totally awesome and everything except we spent the night at my parents and I'd only packed a tank top and shorts to wear today. I had the heater on in the car. In the middle of June. And it wasn't even a last-ditch effort to keep the car from overheating or anything like that.
6. My dad has a new dog who is quite possibly the cutest dog I have ever seen in person. He looks just like a dog from a TV show, doggy-smile and all. It's a great story -- Dad was going back and forth about whether or not he should get another dog (his dog died back early in the spring) and along came this one just walking down his driveway last week. They checked ads and talked with every neighbor within about ten miles (granted, that's like ten people), and all anyone had to say was that they had seen that dog walking down the road that day. In the direction of my dad's house. He looked like a dog who'd been dumped (jerks do that sometimes, especially in rural areas like where Dad lives) and who had a little nudge from God to show him exactly which driveway to walk down.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

another new photographic venture

The thirty days of self-portraits are done. I had so much fun torturing myself with that project that I've moved on to another, details of which are here (click the "about this project" link). Anyone else want to join me? :)

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Strange Ways to Find Me

Kristen posted about her referral stats, and that reminded me that I've been wanting to do the same here. Then T got called out to work overnight (possibly for several nights) and I thought, what better way to put off getting into that empty bed than to sit here doing this? The idea of T being gone always has a tinge of adventure to it, when I think of it from afar. As soon as it actually occurs though, the adventure pretty much goes away and plain old loneliness sets in.

Anyway. These come from my photo blog as well as my main one; the stats are for my entire domain (bwa ha ha!! My domain! Where are my minions? Do I get minions too?). This means that I get a TON of searches for wildflower photos. I hope I've labeled them correctly, or I'll be confusing a lot of poor folks. I also get found by a lot of people who want clapping rhymes, and by even MORE people who want to cheat on their homework. No, you will not find "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh chapter summaries for free" here, or answers to essay questions about Indian in the Cupboard or Izzy, Willy-Nilly or Homecoming or The Phantom Tollbooth or Of Mice and Men. Here's an idea. Go read the book and write your own.

There are also some truly disturbing (and/or disturbed) people out there. Really truly disturbing. Oh my gosh. Sometimes after I read my referral stats I feel the need to go scrub myself with sandpaper and Lava soap in the shower, or something. GO AWAY SCARY GOOGLER, NOTHING TO SEE HERE. And then there are the sad ones -- like Kristen said, there's a person behind each of these things and sometimes I wish I could find the person who searched for, say, "normal O2 saturations" or "prayer to conceive", "how to fall in love again" or "bedtime anxiety", "signs my marriage is falling apart my husband is very distant" or "teased for living in a trailer park" and tell her, it'll be OK, and give her a hug.

This list got really long. This is just a teeny weeny sampling -- the stats go back as long as I've had my blog here at livingdot, which means, what, back till last May?

1. "fly lady homeschooling" -- last I knew you were out of luck on this one.
2. "I'm going crazy pre-menopause" -- oh hon. I am too.
3. "seems to me shania twain has gained unwanted weight" -- oh please. Unwanted for whom? Somebody give that woman a milkshake. Or twelve.
4. "crochet marijuana leaf" -- oh my.
5. "does rachel smell" -- I don't know. Do I? Do I really want to know?
6. "time period of jane austen s the buccaneers" -- That would be rather difficult to pinpoint....
7. "pride and prejudice did it really happen"
8. "tarweed barbie" -- does she come with overalls and a fishing pole, or maybe a dirty face and pigtails? I'd buy that one
9. "free mom se*y legs pictures" -- oh man were YOU disappointed.
10. "cat's urine bleach and ammonia" -- I am not the only one! woo hoo!
11. "blue poppies portraits as in rachels favourite food for friends" -- I am kerflummoxed.
12. "overanalyzing our kids" -- is there a program for this?
13. "darth vader grocery fruit" -- this one was perplexing until I realized they were most likely looking for this.
14. "how to make pinch-pleat drapes" -- I knew I should have put up instructions for those. I meant to, but never did.
15. "real life photo of unicorn" -- um, good luck on that one.
16. "my boring life.com" -- I knew I picked the wrong domain.
17. "ear disorder sharpened hearing telltale heart" -- interesting theory...
18. "civilization III addiction hospitalization" -- dude. I thought the Ts were bad.
19. "stupid things a person does" and "really stupid things a person does" -- you have come to the right place, my friend.
20. "why is housework so depressing" -- it's that 'work' thing, coupled with the 'house' thing, and the 'constantly undoing itself every time you turn around' thing. Search no further; there's your answer.
21. Misspellings like "Luke Skywaker" and "male tranchlas". This is because I post things my kids write, with the original spellings. Who knew that that was the way to make it to the #1 spot in a Google search?
22. "Dickens Pride and Prejudice film adaptations criticism". This is the place to come for criticism of film adaptations, I'll grant you that, but that's one I hadn't heard of.
23. "why is rachel stupid"/"rachel is stupid"/"stupid rachel" -- oh dear. They're onto me.
24. "phrasal adverbs get from pride and prejudice" -- have I ever used the word 'phrasal'? I guess I have now...
25. "is pinch pleat drapes too formal for living room" -- I am the LAST person to ask this question.
26. "quiz Christianese" -- made me chuckle, that one did.
27. "babe in muddy jeans" -- at first, honestly, I saw this and thought of the talking pig. Which would be a more likely thing to find around here than what they were actually looking for...
28. "recipes costco chocolate mousse filling" -- if you find it, do me a favor and email it to me. I am totally not kidding. :)
29. "how do you know a girls is falling in love?"
30. "vasectomy vs. hysterectomy" -- oh, man, are you kidding?
31. "does rachel get things the wrong way around" -- I think so.
32. "tchaikovsky head falling-off hangover" -- words fail.
33. "kiddy crafts for energy" -- wait, to give them energy? do they need those?
34. "weiner in her shoes" -- when I saw this one, honestly, my first thought was -- a hot dog in her shoes? And I thought it was maybe one of the disturbed ones (I finally had to take the high h33ls photo down -- remember, my cute little retro b/w polka-dotted ones? because I got a lot of late-night foreign-country search engine hits for that one, and it started to give me the heebie jeebies. That was my foot they were looking at). Then I remembered this book review and heaved a little sigh of relief.
35. "proof potatoes explode" -- glad I could help.
36. "rachel's pretty feet" -- wrong place again. Definitely.
37. "rachel needs a life" -- as evidenced by the length of this list and the amount of time it represents...

Monday, December 05, 2005

blocked

I've nothing to write about. I don't even feel a great and eager interest in reading. I don't feel much like taking pictures or watching movies. I'm the closest I've been in my entire adult life to being bored -- because heaven forbid I should take my own advice to the kids and find something useful to do, right? or maybe I think sitting at the computer for long spells (reading comic strips and other people's blogs and voting at dpchallenge) is useful, there's always that. Anyway, this all results, as I said in the first sentence, in having nothing to write about. And really, you may not know it, but I think you're glad. Because my boredom is contagious, and the primary method of contamination is through the reading of something I've written, trust me on this.

You know what I think, back in the recesses of my mind, where I keep the things I don't really actually want to think about? I think because I said I would read and write about the Psalms, that's kind of what I (thanks to my subconscious mind, or God, or whatever) am waiting to do, and until I actually follow through on that idea, I'll be in this sorry state. Of course that doesn't make much logical sense, but the ideas in that particular recess of my mind never do. Oddly enough, they also frequently turn out to be right.

(I even tried a meme. A book meme, and even that didn't flow. Sorry state, indeed.)

P.S. I had a family portrait all planned for us, and then today I was at Costco and saw from the cover of a book about the Beatles that the Beatles had already done my idea. (four people lying with their heads together on the floor). Even to the black turtlenecks. Now we can never do that pose, because God forbid anyone should ever walk into our house and say to my husband, "Hey, I like that portrait! It's like the Beatles one!" No... not a pretty scene, that.

Monday, November 14, 2005

neglect

I've been neglecting my poor loyal blog readers (I can tell you are all SO disappointed). I apologize. It's all dpchallenge.com's fault. That and just plain busy-ness. Here are some things that happened over the past four or five days (oh goody, a list!):

• T had a four-day weekend. This is always nice. Four days is so luxurious, because on Friday you get that Sunday he's-going-back-to-work-tomorrow kind of dread feeling, and then you realize that there are two more whole days with him at home. It's like a present, every time you remember.
• We cut wood. It was not so bad. I got brownie points (from myself, anyway) for doing this even though a few short days before, I had done that whole falling-on-a-trash-can-from-a-fence thing. I wasn't very sore, and it felt good to get out and do something.
• On the way home from woodcutting, my staggeringly-arachnophobic husband stopped the car and let me photograph a tarantula in the road, before backing up to run over it (previously he's only offered to allow me to photograph them afterward), on the condition that he never have to see the pictures ever in his life. You may not understand, on simply reading that sentence, how very generous of him this was. Trust me, it was a huge sacrifice on his part.
• We went to the city, 40 miles away. Twice. ugh. Wal-Mart both times. Double ugh.
• LT was finally able to have his Star Wars All Six Episodes Marathon with his best friend. It ended up being broken up over two days. Much candy, soda, and popcorn were consumed.
• C had her first paid modeling session. She earned a vanilla Coke all for herself by standing/sitting/lying on the lawn for fifteen minutes, talking to me and making faces, while I took her picture about thirty times. This was, of course, for a contest at dpchallenge.com. (stay tuned for reports about tonight's photo session involving T, his new-to-him slide projector, and his astronomy photos.)
• Um. Thatisall. I think.

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