wallpaper Stand Back!

wallpaper Inspired by a post at Geology Rocks; base photo from here. Ah, rocks. How I love pounding on you.

wallpaper Friday Forays in Fiction: Quote

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There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You can never quite tell where they will take you.

Mine took me here.

--Beatrix Potter in the first line of the movie Miss Potter

wallpaper It's Full of Stars!

I tend to assume that many of the silly things that fly at me out of the innertubz are faked or photoshopped. Yesterday I posted an image of a "monolith action figure" about which I made that assumption... mistakenly. It's a real thing that's really for sale at ThinkGeek and Amazon.

• Properly proportioned to those in the movies 2001 and 2010 (1:4:9 - the squares of the first 3 integers)
• Made of semisynthetic, organic, amorphous, solid materials (AKA plastic)
• Zero (0) points of articulation
• May cause strange magnetic fields, action figure evolution, seeing things filled with stars, and/or more (or it might just sit on your desk doing nothing)

It's going for $12.99, which seems kind of spendy for what it is, but face it: it comes with that packaging, which is sort of priceless. (Hat tip to Rawley for letting me know this is an actual thing and where to find it.)

wallpaper Bring the Excitement Home!

Now you too can ignite consciousness! Trigger sentience in a primitive mind! Start a landslide of self-awareness! Fire the starting gun in the long, difficult race from the primordial ooze to intelligence!
wallpaper I'm sending a dozen to Glenn Beck. Oh, and Bill O'Reilly. Mustn't forget "Where'd that come from" O'Reilly. (picture from Skull Swap)

wallpaper One Step at a Time

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Have been reading David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I'm beginning to envision a future not too far off in which completing one of my novels will be as doable as completing an afghan such as the one I'm currently working on.

Since I continue to work apace (nearly) on the baby afghan, I continue to see the daily progress and the end product gets clearer and clearer as the stitches accumulate.

I was already thinking how nice it would be if I could make similar progress to that of the afghan on my stories, blog improvement, other needle/hook work, research and the myriad other projects I got going or want to get going on even before I picked up this book. Now, after reading less than fifty pages I'm beginning to see what I was doing right (so far) with the afghan project and how those behaviors can be translated to other projects.

Some of those 'doing it right' behaviors:

• I had a clear idea of what the finished product was and what each interim step consisted of.
• I had a deadline and knew how to spread the daily quotas of work somewhat evenly across the days available.
• I had the supplies I needed.
• I had a work-station conducive to the work.

Allen says that most of our stress is caused by trying to keep too much information in our memory and like a computer with overloaded RAM we will start malfunctioning.

His solution is to collect all of our To Dos--100%--in easily input and retrievable and regularly reviewed filing systems whether notebooks, PIMs, electronic or paper. And in those systems the outcome of each task/project should be made clear and each action/step toward that outcome defined as well as each dependency--tasks whose completion must precede the start of other tasks.

So far all I'm doing is picturing in my mind what such a list will begin to look like and it is quite daunting. But I realize after four weeks of steady progress on the afghan that what is missing in order to see similar progress on other projects, including the novels, is a clearly defined list of 'next actions' so that whether I find an unanticipated free time block or set designated ones, I will have a specific doable task to apply my attention to and be able to not fret over all of the yet-to-do tasks for I can be confident that each of them will have their appropriate turn.

Just as I don't need to fret about iteration 14 of the ten row pattern in the afghan while I'm working row 5 of iteration 11.

wallpaper News Item

35 dead, 74 injured in Italian hunting season. Tom Lehrer was prescient. From 1960:

wallpaper Today in Stupid

wallpaper Which does Faux News not get: plate tectonics or geography? (Hint: I'm betting on both.) Hullabaloo
wallpaper This Bunsen Boehner looks suspiciously like that other guy: (image above and awful pun mine) wallpaper SwansonTea: F*@&ing Bill O’Reilly — How Does He Work?

As long as there is one thing that science can’t explain (or he doesn’t understand), all is well with his world. It’s amazing to me that this argument makes sense to him.

wallpaper EB Misfit points out that the designers of this logo have the Wright brothers the first to fly a heavier-than-air craft... backwards. Whether this bodes poorly for the competition remains to be seen.

wallpaper String Theory

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Today I hyperfocused on the baby afghan again. Worked six 36 inch rows in pretty much one sitting while watching two movies and three Heroes season 4 episodes. The two movies were Spiderman 2 and Air Bud Golden Receiver. I was hoping to make up for some of the the quota that didn't get done during Bloggiesta this past weekend and the library visit yesterday. I was behind by ten rows. Since the first four rows I did today count for today's quota only, I've made up only two rows.

I think I better lighten up tomorrow though and probably should stop altogether tonight. When I was dishing up my dinner tonight I almost dropped the serving bowl and I was nearly holding my breath all through doing dishes for fear of dropping something breakable. For my thumb and index finger and wrist on my right hand were not dependable and an electric sizzle shot up the inside of my left arm from pinky to armpit every time I raised it above the level of my lowest rib. The uncooperativeness of my right hand was not a surprise but that sizzle in my left arm was quite disconcerting. Apparently holding the growing afghan steady at the right distance is as demanding on the physical structure of the arm as is plying the hook itself.

The afghan is now bulky enough to be be in my way as I work on it which is a problem with no obvious solution. The thread is constantly getting trapped under it or in the folds. I now have 95 36 inch rows. I'm aiming for 155. It is now 36 X 18 inches.

Watch for a picture on Thursday for the end of week 4 progress report.

BTW I learned yesterday that my niece may be bringing the baby this way in late February. So I am highly motivated to have the afghan finished by then. If I can maintain the pace getting the rows done should be no problem. I'm concerned abou the fringe though. There are to be 150 or so per side and I have no idea how long that will take. I was planning to fringe all four sides but am now considering doing only the two sides where the rows begin and end which is where the start and finish thread tails are. I'll decide after I've got most of one side done which will give a better idea of the time involved.

wallpaper Sunday Serenity #213

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I have accomplished my highest priority Bloggiesta goal!!!!!

I changed templates. And I did it myself.

Of course I had my techie husband sitting across the table from me to answer questions and make suggestions but I made every final decision and every mouse-click and keyboard tap myself.

wallpaper I made the graphic for the header myself too. But I must give proper credit for the photo which I adapted to my sister-friend Jamie who made the shot out the car window when she came along when my sister delivered me back to Ed at Rice Hill OR last winter. Probably in late January.

I have loved this photo so much that I've had it as my desktop since July.

Light coming out of the dark can stand as a theme for my life so this may end up being a long term look and not the temp graphic I set out to make this weekend to stand in until I could create one that had images representing all my passions: reading, writing, needlework/crochet, cats....

I've been contemplating such an all encompassing image since last summer during the last Bloggiesta. But I couldn't come up with a concept that didn't overwhelm me with clutter and I have enough of that to deal with in the room I spend 90% of my time in.

At the moment, I'm pretty happy with the way this looks. Any thoughts?

Of course, all my new sidebars and footer columns still need a lot of work. I have fiddled with them some but I've still got a lot of reorganizing to do. Especially where the images are too big for the new sidebar widths. Also many links I know are defunct and I'm sure there are more I'm unaware of. And there are many many more I want to add. I've been putting off working on my side bar because I knew this template switch was in the works.

I'm probably going to be changing fonts and colors too but that will have to wait until my eyes have had a rest. And my brain. I've been awake nearly 20 hours now and have been working on this non-stop for eight.

Oh yes. A great big thanks to Ourblogtemplates.com for the free template. I chose The Professional Template

wallpaper It's Bloggiesta Time!

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wallpaper PEDRO
Plan. Edit. Develop. Review. Organize

That's what this party is all about. Blog improvement. Three days in which to devote time and attention in the company of like-hearted people who bring to the party buffet their knowledge, expertise, experience, enthusiasm and encouragement.
That's a lot gathered into one virtual place for 72 hours. But it ain't all. There is also FUN. Games (mini-challenges) and Prizes.

Join the fiesta at MAW Books.

Below this paragraph right here is where I'll be posting updates on what I'm accomplishing throughout the weekend.

Umm been doing a lot of lurking. Need to break that habit.

Did My Friend Amy's mini-challenge on goal setting. Made that my Saturday post.

Have accomplished my main goal of changing templates as of 4pm PST Sunday. See my Sunday Serenity post for more detail.

Involved in that project and a project in its own right was a good amount of fussing and fiddling with sidebar and footer widgets--organizing and cleaning up defunct stuff etc.

Also involved and a major project in itself was creating the graphic for the header myself.

Since Friday morning I've clocked nearly 20 hours of Bloggiesta doings.

I think maybe it counts for Bloggiesta that I just finally uploaded a picture for my Twitter profile. The same one I'm using here now and the same one I am using at facebook since a couple weeks ago. I think it was during the last Bloggiesta that I learned that having a common look across the platforms is helpful.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I'm so late getting my kick-off post up because I'm still sleeping days even tho Ed has been off swing shift since Xmas eve. Since I'm a natural night owl the sleep schedule I settled into while he was on swing was more like staying up a bit later than usual than a complete change for me as it was for him. But instead of returning to my normal bedtime of 4 to 5 am and sleeping til noonish I've tended to stay up even later than the 9ish I had been, pushing my lay down time closer and closer to noon and then waking for dinner.

Thus work on my daily post usually begins after dinner but today I had intended to put up this post before I lay down. But while preparing the post I got side-tracked into doing some of the PEDRO stuff instead of just writing about it. Next thing I knew it was past noon and then waaaaaaay past noon.

I didn't lay down until after 3pm and then Ed woke me for the dinner he was preparing me at 8:30pm. Salmon on a bed of citrus, mango and hickima. Mmmmm.

This is my second Bloggiesta and I was so ambitious last time the list of improvements I made was long enough to need four Bloggiesta's to complete. So I'll continue to plug away at it and add to it. But I have two primary goals for this weekend: First to take advantage of the collective knowledge and experience to learn, learn, learn. Especially to learn what it is I don't yet know I need to learn. And second, to change my template to a three column.

That last was one of the biggies on my list last June and I almost got to it. I'd found the template and downloaded it but I needed a photo or graphic for the masthead.

That's what I was fiddling with this morning. I hunted down the template file and the website where I got it and where the instructions for implementing it are and I played with graphics until I'd made one that I think I can live with for a few months or even years. Years is more likely since I am so averse to change.

Many if not most of the tasks on the very long list I made during the June Bloggiesta have been on hold until I got this template changed over since so many of them involved sidebar and other template or blog organization work that would just have to be redone after the template switch or promotion which I thought should wait until my blog had had its makeover.

wallpaper Having One of Those Days

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Ever had one of those days you'd like to put back in the box marked return to sender?

I pinched my left pinky finger on the tender inside skin right where my engagement ring rubs. Pinched it between my netbook and something on the tray it sets on or possibly between lid and keyboard as I tried to stop it from falling.

Later I yanked my netbook off my desk by the headphone cord as I tried to rush in the other room when I heard alarming sound from the room where Ed was watching TV. First he was coughing which morphed into choking or gagging then a few loud thumps or stomps then dead silence.

He was fine. Turned out he'd started coughing as he was standing up from the recliner and lost his balance and fell back into it.

Had to take out row's 77 and 76 on the baby afghan after finding an error in the early part of row 76 as I neared the end of row 77. Most frustrating about this is that it wasn't the first time I've had to take out parts or all of rows 76 and/or 77. In fact I've had to do it more than once to every row since row 74. Since Monday afternoon at the end of that triumphant twelve hour push that netted me ten good rows, I've done the work of ten more rows but have only 2.5 to show for it.

Tomorrow noon is the three week mark. After the 33 row first week I'd hoped to be on row 99 by then. Not going to happen. Obviously.

Then this evening I spent a couple hours preparing the fifteen library books that were due on Tuesday for their trip to the library in the morning. This involved a lot of regret and sadness and self-recrimination over all the reading I didn't get done in the nine weeks I'd had them. There are several more due tomorrow and I'll be sending some of them back but hanging onto some of them until Monday morning in the faint hope I'll still do something with them in spite of the fact I haven't since the day they arrived nine weeks ago..

wallpaper PC Versus AG

wallpaper One of these guys is John Hodgman, the PC guy. The other is Oregon's new Attorney General, John Kroger. Can you tell which is which? (Hint: I can't, either.)

wallpaper Noted in Passing

Skimming through Google Reader a moment ago, this item caught my eye... wallpaper Wow. Things are pretty desperate out in the real world, folks.

wallpaper The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything

is not 42. It's all a mistake. wallpaper Someecards

wallpaper I Have a Dream Within a Dream Within a Dream...

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see more Comixed. For a serious piece of the profundity of King's words and deeds in a much-too-short life, you could do worse than Leonard Pitts' column. I appreciate learning more about the breadth of his concerns... it wasn't just about African Americans, but all the downtrodden.

wallpaper Stealing This Line

"I've been a Libra my entire life. Now all of the sudden I've been downgraded to a Virgo? Why didn't my previous horoscope warn me about this change?"

Indeed. (Bits and Pieces) Also, "I feel for those who tattooed their sign on their ass. (Not really)"

wallpaper Sunday Serenity #212

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see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Snuggles and Cuddles
Oh yeah.

wallpaper Go Ahead. Ignore It.

wallpaper Wil Wheaton's Tumblr. Followup: I thought this looked like a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal panel, and it is.

wallpaper LOL-e-gaggin

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I'm busy playing with my string. So let me share with you a couple LOLs I captioned at ceezeburger.com

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wallpaper All of The Substance, None of The Noise

I'm reminded of Max Headroom, but he was at least clever and funny.