Category Archives: Connections

Guck, Bucum, and Scrud

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In the last few weeks, I’ve gotten pretty obsessed with the A&E reality show, “Hoarders,” which if you can get past the piles of junk, “treasures,” and poo, is compelling. In the season preview clip above, the newly famous Possum From Hoarders makes her (not his) daring leap for freedom after being poked with a stick. This little clip apparently kept the other obsessed fans talking all summer, but the actual appearance of the Awesome Possum did not disappoint; she hopped in a handy Pet Taxi and lit off for the bright lights of the big city. You can read all about her adventures on her Facebook fan page. Seriously, comic relief like this makes watching “Hoarders” bearable; otherwise it’s just one horror show after another. So fans focus on silly things like possumbombs and kitchen rakes to keep from shouting “NO, THROW IT OUT, THROW IT OUT, NO DON’T SAVE IT, IT’S GARBAGE” at their televisions.

Since then, I’ve been cleaning and organizing stuff pretty much every time I catch an episode, and today I’m cleaning out the guest room, which has been “the room where all the snorkel stuff is in the middle of the floor” for many months now. At the moment, the luggage and snorkel gear is now neatly stacked in the closet, which has been cleared for my guest, but after my lunch-tea-and-blogging break I need to get the freshly laundered sheets on the bed (fancy new dryer just beeped happily) and sweep the floor, vacuum, and damp mop with the wooden floor cleaner.

I already cleaned a lot of guck, bucum, and scrud in the kitchen, but there’s more to do. Definitions to follow…

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Tolkien Hated Hitler: What Would He Make Of Glenn Beck?

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What with all Chaplinesque moustache-porn videos going around, I do wonder what J.R.R. Tolkien would make of the current culture wars. He knew his way around a mythology, invented or real, so I wonder what he’d think of Beck’s reverse-engineering of the national mythos of the Founding Fathers?

10. He wasn’t nearly as fond of Nazis as they were of him.

Tolkien’s academic writings on Old Norse and Germanic history, language and culture were extremely popular among the Nazi elite, who were obsessed with recreating ancient Germanic civilization. But Tolkien was disgusted by Hitler and the Nazi party, and made no secret of the fact. He considered forbidding a German translation of The Hobbit after the German publisher, in accordance with Nazi law, asked him to certify that he was an “Aryan.” Instead, he wrote a scathing letter asserting, among other things, his regret that he had no Jewish ancestors. His feelings are also evidenced in a letter he wrote to his son: “I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler … Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”

Via mental_floss Blog » 10 Things You Should Know About J.R.R. Tolkien

The Weekend of Awesome

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Let’s see… it’s Wednesday, so I’ve finally recovered from the barrage of total neatorama that occured last weekend. My husband David’s birthday luau, and some HTML and CSS geekery, and then on Sunday evening, we actually MADE IT TO WOOTSTOCK V2.2 IN CHICAGO!!!!!!!11!! (my bangs, they go to 11).

If you’ve spent any time reading here, you know we’re really big fans of going to Hawaii, and we’ve been to a bunch of luaus and other Hawaiian-type dinner shows over the years. We’ve even gone with friends, and done goofy things with them just because we were in Hawaii.

But Friday’s dinner at a local strip-mall based eatery called the Tiki Terrace was one of the best times we’ve had in years – at least, without having to spend 6 hours stuffed into Economy Minus and suffer jet leg. While we were waiting for the dinner-and-a-show thing to start, we were discussing some of our adventures from long ago, when we totally BURIED STEVE and would have left him there if we could have.  Because we’d still be there if we had.

If Only Steve Had Stayed Buried

That’s our friend Earle on the left, and David’s best friend Steve in the middle,  who organized the evening at Tiki Terrace. Earle’s wife Sandy couldn’t be there on Friday or we almost would have had the old band together (we went with 5 friends in 2004).

Earle also enjoys Hawaiian culture and so I was pretty sure he was enjoying the ambiance at the Tiki Terrace.

Anyway, it was hella fun, because there was a special guest at the show. I started to get excited, thinking it was one of the performers we might have seen on our visits to the islands, but it turned out to be vastly better than that. After all, this is a place that features ginormous Easter Island statues and superior tiki decor, all in a long narrow dining room stuck in a suburban strip mall. My sister-in-law Gloria and I discussed the origins of Tiki culture, which we decided were probably rooted in the collective conciousness of thousands of WWII GIs coming home with island crap and deciding to start a bar, while we waited for the special guest to come out.

Aloha from Tiki Elvis

Tiki Elvis wonders if you are lonely tonight

Yes! It’s Tiki Elvis! He sings for you! Admit it, you were expecting maybe Iz? Or Don Ho?

Sure, it’s kitschy — very kitschy, but also cozy and friendly and fun. They’re open 7 days a week, but the hula show is only on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s like a one-night vacation, and we’re probably going to go back when the mood strikes us (reservations are probably essential for show nights).

Serious Hula, Bro

They also have some very good hula dancers, plus the obligatory host who sings a little, jokes a little, and dances a little — and the bartender will come out and sing something if everybody claps hard enough (he’s very good,  but any resemblance to Tiki Elvis is strictly coininkidental).

The surprising thing is that everybody in the front of house is pretty young – even the host, who sported tailbone-length hair and some serious tattoos when he came out to do a New Zealand men’s haka with the other male dancer. They were both very impressive, and actually I got a little irritated at the tableful of tween girls who were shrieking and giggling at the shirtless tattooed guys wearing nothing but muscles and tightly knotted pareus.

Guess I could hardly blame them, it was clearly their first adult-type birthday outing (they were wearing lots of that Libby Lu girly-girly makeup stuff).

The service is friendly, the crowd is clearly there to have a good time (there was one very large party celebrating a big birthday) and the menu is pretty reasonable (it’s all prix-fixe luau food, but appetizers and desserts are extra).

The only problem we had was that we finished dinner a little too close to the beginning of the show, and our dessert orders couldn’t come out until long after the show had finished, so we did wait what seemed like a really long time for our tropical desserts. Our waitress was cute and pretty attentive, but she did kind of disappear when we were wondering if she’d forgotten about the sweets.

David was adamant about not going up on stage for any hula shenanigans so we all maintained radio silence when the time came for the obligatory “let’s get all the birthday people up here and make them do the hula” portion of the evening. Honestly, the guys they DID get up there did a fine job of goofing around, and the stage was kind of small anyway.

So once it was over, we all headed for home, wearing our luau finery, and it looks like we’ll have to make a group trip of it this February for Steve’s 50th… oh, dear.

But that’s not all the awesome! There’s even moar!

Helpless Flailing Eventually Results In New Church Website Going Live

Okay, not that awesome actually, but it’s been kind of an issue for some weeks/months/years that the design we went with after the merger was not what we had discussed when I stepped back from being a webmistress and just maintained the church blog (more or less).

Actually, it got to be kind of depressing how I could not seem to get a link to the blog from the church main page, because the previous webmaster had hosted it through Yahoo and kept losing the link every time he updated some news item on the front page. I had given up asking him to put a real, premanent link on there… but he was very busy with seminary so it wasn’t a very big priority.

Anyway, he’s on track towards ordination as a deacon now and had to hand off the web duties, and there was no one else at church with ANY kind of ability to do a web page, so I was asked to take it on. I agreed, as long as we could completely re-do the site, and host it, and convert it over to a WordPress installation much as I had done with the old Holy Innocents site. For one thing, I wanted to be able to do most of the rejiggering, with David’s help, and not have to do it with Front Page, which I had not been crazy about before.

And so here it is although it’s really just a fancy mockup of what I hope to do with it – the main page will probably get a major makeover as I re-learn the stuff I want to do with images in GIMP and catch up on what CSS can do – for now it’s arranged with simple tables (please don’t view source, eek). I did at least manage to produce the background images and banner image (the photo strip isn’t my work, it’s one element I brought over from the previous layout).

There were technical problems and delays getting the domain registration transfered from the previous hosting service, and frankly it took much too long because of it being too complicated… but the middle of last week, it was finalized at last, and I had been fooling with a highly customizable blog template, creating pages to put the content in, and messing with what became the static front page.

Saturday night it was almost ready to “cut over,” and I was messing around on Facebook uploading some photos I’d found on my hard drive when I got an IM from the former webmaster, chiding me about the lateness of the hour and reminding me I had church in the morning. So that turned out to be fun and I’m glad for him that he’s finally on his way toward ordination, after kind of being stuck in the process while at St Nick’s. What with one thing and another, we didn’t actually cut everything over from old to new until last night, but it was essentially done Saturday except for minor styling changes.

So yeah, talked to people at church, got the final “Oh, Ginny, I’d like you to” aesthetic tweaks from Father Steve, and then it was time to go home and prepare for what became THE MOST AWESOME AWESOMENESS that occured on Sunday night, ever, in the history of the world.

W00tSTOCK CHICAGO V2.2

W00tstock Chicago poster

Poster by Len Peralta/@jawboneradio (CC Some Rights Reserved)

David had his iPhone and his brand new Canon EOS 7D, the one with the really good video (used in a recent commercial). I had my iPhone and an excessive amount of screaming w00tiness.

Both are in evidence in the following:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlHtIrOtYqE

I can be heard laughing in the background saying “eBay!” at one point. But mostly it’s Mr Savage’s party piece (with rather impressive hardware).

There was just SO MUCH w00ty goodness, so many funny people and cartoonists and musicians and people doing readings from books and talking about losing their Rocky Horror virginity… great overview here, in  fact, as my memory is just one happy shouty jumble.

I took a few pictures with the iPhone and tweeted a HELL of a lot:

Flickr

Sign in the parking garage we eventually found right around the back of the Park West venue. Duh. $20 well spent.

Flickr

Paul and Storm singing “We’re the Opening Band.”

Flickr

Ceiling Cat was the default desktop on the media screens when they weren’t playing cartoons, Moments with Wil, or showing pictures of destitute Stormtroopers panhandling. Some of the comedy came from minor glitches with volume or opening the wrong file. Everything got a big laugh, because everything was funny. It was the kind of instant geek nationhood that springs up at a good convention.

Wootstock Tweets

mai tweets, let me show you them

Here’s a great picture of Peter Sagal that David took – in character as a henchman who dreams of being the hero for once.

WWDTM's Peter Sagal, as The Henchman

Thanks to @jernst, there’s audio, and it’s all shareable and whatnot.  You must listen! It’s too big to upload here.

There’s all kinds of photos on Flickr and Twitter, and there’s stuff from Minneapolis, the next night in the tour, all over everywhere.

Monday at work was…. painful as we didn’t get home until about 130am. The show is billed as “3 Hours of Geeks and Music” but actually it’s closer to 4 or 5 (depending on how much digressing is going on, and how long it takes to get through the last song).

Give you an idea; during the show, a recurring them was “but I digress.” So David registered a domain, www.butidigress.net. Don’t know what he’ll do with it – maybe collect lists of cover bands and tribute bands (hard to explain why that would be funny, watch some of the videos).

Yeah. I can’t wait until the next version comes out.

Dear Wally, Wish You Were Here

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Vietnam Reflections

Dear Wally (nobody ever called you Edward except your dad, and the Army),

A lot has happened since 1968. Your two daughters have grown up, and you’re a name on a smoothly polished, black granite wall in Washington DC . They’ve both struggled a bit (maybe because you were taken away from them far too soon) but seem to be fine now. You’re a grandfather, can you believe it? Neither can I. In fact, you have an amazing step-daughter and a couple of cute step-grandkids; you know how the living always say “life goes on,” and it did.

Jolly Roger TopFlier kite

I never thanked you for your service, because I was just a buck-toothed, cross-eyed little kid when you left for Vietnam. But you taught me some important lessons when you used to be the Army guy across the street that married my sister; I have no fear of stomping tomato worms (how did you know I’d turn out to be such a tomboy?), and I still like flying kites, although I’ve never found one to top the simple, 10-cent TopFlite Jolly Roger you bought at the local drugstore. It looked grand up there in the sky, all piratey and swashbucklery, but then the string broke, and you had a crisis on your hands. It was either stop the kid from crying and find her kite, or give up and go home. To your credit, you drove around in the empty field looking for it, after we walked around trying to see if it had fallen from the sky and gotten tangled up somewhere. Not sure, but I think you may have distracted me from the depressing sight of it caught on a telephone wire by telling me it must have flown for miles and miles.

You did well in the Army (well, your dad being an Air Force colonel didn’t hurt) and you and my sister Tudy had some interesting postings (Fort Bragg, Germany) with your oldest daughter before the time came for you to be sent to Vietnam as an officer in 1968. By then, of course, you were a captain. You looked very brave and strong in your uniform at the airport when we sent you off; that was in Salt Lake, where you’d moved your family to be near Mom “in case.” You’d already dealt with tragedy, losing your baby son Michael in that car accident when you were all on the way… that was terrible, and I guess my mom and everyone thought the Army wouldn’t make you go away after that. Especially as Tudy was pregnant with Heather by then and Holly, your first born, was just getting to school age.

But off you went, striding purposefully into the strong glare of the sun at the old Salt Lake airport after saying your goodbyes at the departure gate (you wouldn’t believe the b.s. we go through now to travel by air). It was hard to see you against the sun in the doorway, where you turned and went away, never to return in the same form. The little pins and badges you wore glinted, and you were gone.

I hope you like the memorial in Washington DC; it’s probably more popular than the war it commemorates ever was. It ensures that people won’t forget, I guess, and it’s moving and sombre. But people continue to leave stuff there, and I’d always thought it would be nice to fly the Jolly Roger just once more and leave it there for you, to be carefully catalogued with your name and the date and archived by some volunteer… of course, the kite you chose because it was the most bad-ass and un-girly in the store turned out to be a classic, and something we now call a “collectible” worth between $30-100.

Bet you’re laughing your ass off now, and wishing we’d tried a little harder to find it that day, hey?

I can’t even begin to explain the “virtual world” concept, but there’s a Vietnam Memorial in Second Life, too. I’ll be dropping by there later today – and maybe I’ll try to make my own little virtual kite to fly there in your honor.

In church yesterday (I don’t think you were all that much into God stuff but anyway here it is), a friend who’s had his own struggles with life after the service gave a special prayer in honor of Memorial Day and guys like you. He read something from a magazine he’d found, that concluded “all gave some, some gave all.” Some country music singer turned part of that phrase into a song a while back; you probably would have liked it a lot.

I’m still sad that you’re one of the ones that had to give all. It may not look like you and all the other guys from all the other wars are remembered by this country much (except when it benefits the politicians of every stripe that “run” the place), but you are remembered. In spite of all the Memorial Day sales, and barbecues, and people just sitting around on a Monday dinking around on computers (I know, weird, huh?), you’re not forgotten.

So anyway, Wally, thank you for your service. Hope there’s a nice breeze for flying kites where ever you are.

UPDATE:

So yes, I did make it inworld to see the virtual Vietnam Memorial…

Edward W Crum at the Vietnam Memorial in SL

It’s always Cherry Blossom Time at the virtual Vietnam Memorial – the trees are lovely, the lighting is nice.

Closeup of Vietnam Memorial

So many names, it’s hard to find the one you want. There’s a scripted object that helps seekers find them, though

Too many names. Had a nice conversation with a Swedish woman, who was quietly respectful. Nice.

Red Rocks Mesa Veterans Memorial

Bought a kite, found a desert memorial to veterans, could not fly due to no build privileges at Red Rock Mesa, SL

Flying my Jolly Roger kite over my land in Tintafel; neighbor’s house is a large glowing planet

Second Life image of kite flying over sea

Taken at Surf Camp in PrimWorks, Second Life. That’s an incoming wave…did you end up learning to surf?

Inspired by Simply Left BehindThe Non-Rapturist’s Guide To The Galaxy: Thank You.

What Next?

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It will be interesting to see what my nephew will have to say about his experiences when he gets back from his trip to Israel. He’s a history student currently, but I don’t know if he’s a student OF history; doubt if he’s made the connection that my online acquaintance Mad Priest did.

BBC News – Deaths as Israeli forces storm Gaza aid ship

More than 10 people have been killed after Israeli commandos stormed a convoy of ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army says.

Armed forces boarded the largest vessel overnight, clashing with some of the 500 people on board.

It happened about 40 miles (64 km) out to sea, in international waters.

Israel says its soldiers were shot at and attacked with weapons; the activists say Israeli troops came on board shooting.

There has been widespread condemnation of the violence, with several countries summoning the Israeli ambassadors serving there.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon said he was “shocked by reports of killings and injuries” and called for a “full investigation” into what happened.

Cartoon via Mad Priest: The Lost Tribe of the Axis of Evil

REAL Vermonter-American Mama Grizzly Bear Defends Her Young

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@SarahPalinUSA needs to read this letter to the editor of the White River Junction (VT) Valley Times to see how a REAL mama grizzly defended her young in 2000. So good, I quoted the whole thing. h/t MadPriest Of Course, I Could Be Wrong…: ANSWER THAT!.

Sent in to MadPriest Towers by THEMETHATISME:

A letter from SHARON UNDERWOOD
published by The Valley News
(White River Junction, VT)
Sunday, April 30, 2000

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I’ve taken enough from you good people.

I’m tired of your foolish rhetoric about the “homosexual agenda” and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.

He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called “fag” incessantly, starting when he was 6.

In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn’t bear to continue living any longer, that he didn’t want to be gay and that he couldn’t face a life without dignity.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don’t know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn’t put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it’s about time you started doing that.

At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won’t get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don’t know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.

If you want to tout your own morality, you’d best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I’m puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that’s not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?

A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I’ll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for “true Vermonters.”

You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn’t give their lives so that the “homosexual agenda” could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn’t the measure of the man.

You religious folk just can’t bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.

How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.

You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.

The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about “those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing” asks: “What ever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings than we are?”

Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

Common Sense For British Voters

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Stephen Fry lays it out. Ultimately, vote how you like, but VOTE!

How I will vote… « Stephen Fry.

More important than my own political views or my own voting intentions are my hopes that nothing I say will stop you from choosing Conservative if you consider it the right way to cast your vote. It may be you will be voting Tory through dyed-in-the-wool instinct and loyalty or it may be that you are someone who once voted Labour or Lib Dem but who has decided that Cameron and the Conservatives will be best for Britain. It’s none of my business, but do vote just as you want and be proud to do so.

Mission Accomplished

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It’s a funny old Sunday for me; had to get up and out the door this morning by 4: 30am to get my husband David off to O’Hare for his flight to Orlando for a technical conference. He’s there, he’s run into some of his list members, he’s That Mailing List Guy.  He runs a lot of mailing lists that cover areas of expertise that are mostly to do with the AS/400 iSeries Systemi whatever IBM calls their midrange computing platform this week.

He got all packed last night, including the traditional “I can’t find my pants” crisis which fortunately was solved easily. Last time this happened, he had packed a brand new dress suit carefully in his suit bag, got to the conference, crashed in a friend’s room before his room was ready, then could not find his pants about an hour before the very important presentation.

He called me demanding to know if I had packed his dress pants. “Where are my PANTS?!? Did you pack them?”

It was the stress, really. He was nervous about the possibility of picking up a very prestigious award, and about maybe having to make an acceptance speech.

I reminded him that he’d packed up his suit bag very methodically with the brand new suit, and while I was checking the closet here just in case, he remembered the part about the friend’s room, tracked him down, and found his pants hanging in the closet.

Pants crisis: resolved.

Last night, it was more of a laundry/underwear crisis, much more easily fixed. There was clean laundry in baskets, but none of them seemed to contain socks and underwear. Keep in mind that we just got moved back into the master bedroom after more than 3 weeks, camping out in the guest room while we worked on our “3 day flooring project.” Our first night back in our own bed was Saturday, and the drawers which had been stacked up in the middle of the room had all be replaced in the dressers, thank GAWD, but there were still several laundry baskets that needed to be folded and put away.

There always are, I think they breed.

Anyway, David had clearly been searching frantically for his oddments of male netherwear when he shouted down from above “I can’t find any UNDERPANTS! ARRRGH!”

Stress, again: this time, it’s the plain old “early flight tomorrow, don’t want to forget anything, meanwhile I’m giving a presentation before the opening session” variety.

Soon enough, after we went through some baskets and checked the dresser drawers (which may have had stuff misfiled in them during the time they were stacked in the middle of the room), the Great Underpants Crisis of Nought ’10 was over. It was nervewracking and there was the distinct possibility that one of us would have to run out and get a 3-pack of white knittery, but fortunately it wasn’t necessary.

So David is off in Orlando, and I’m here for the beginning of the work week thinking about tasks and chores that I’d like to do, but that will probably get blown off if I’m not careful.

Believe it or not, blogging is a task AND a chore, because I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging lately what with how easy it is to just tweet something, and how hard it is to blog something with the iPhone now that both of my little bookmarklets stopped working. Anything seen during the normal workday is either a quick and easy tweet, a moblog picture (another dead easy function set up via Flickr), a del.icio.us link, or not at all, as it’s no longer a simple thing to pick up a link with WordPress’ “Press This” javascript functionality on the iPhone (although it still works perfectly on a desktop machine). I’m not sure why, actually; it may be a security “feature” stemming from some update or other. I didn’t want to bother David with it yesterday since he was trying to get all his stuff ready and packed, and it can certainly wait for his return.

Anyway, there it is; it’s not easy to blog using WordPress’ own iPhone app, as I just commented on Tiny Screenfuls, yet it’s easy to send a post to WordPress via Flickr, del.icio.us, or Google Reader if you set them up with the right permissions (and in Flickr’s case, a template that applies my beloved CSS drop shadows).

Why can’t WordPress’s app grab a link, for gosh sakes? Why did my handy Press This app stop working right? Grr.

Anyway, my hour of blogging is over, but there’s still a bit more to discuss: my accomplishment of mission.

We had a family member’s discarded laptop, which David got several weeks ago at a family gathering, that he was going to “part out.” After some tinkering around, however, he got it working, but we forgot to take it with us a couple of weekends ago when we met up as a family to visit our young nephew in college for lunch. Darn! So after missing another opportunity to get the now-working laptop back to its home, I managed to meet up this morning after church, although it might have worked to drop it off in the down time I had between O’Hare (5:15 AM) and church (8:15 AM). But no, it worked out fine to meet afterwards, although to make it happen I had to navigate to a shopping mall in Vernon Hills… AND deal with an escalator (I have a weird perception problem that makes it hard to use down escalators, and I tend to balk and head for the nearest elevator to avoid it). Found my family members at the designated drop point, exchanged signs and countersigns (“Hi, you guys!” and “Hey, you made it”), and handed over the laptop.

I thought I had a schedule conflict and couldn’t stay for lunch, but the conflict evaporated, drat it. So: Noodles & Company for me. Later tonight, leftovers. And that’s a little over an hour of righteous, linky-loving blogging.

And thus endeth the post, thanks be to Gawd.

Mission Accomplished

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It’s a funny old Sunday for me; had to get up and out the door this morning by 4: 30am to get my husband David off to O’Hare for his flight to Orlando for a technical conference. He’s there, he’s run into some of his list members, he’s That Mailing List Guy.  He runs a lot of mailing lists that cover areas of expertise that are mostly to do with the AS/400 iSeries Systemi whatever IBM calls their midrange computing platform this week.

He got all packed last night, including the traditional “I can’t find my pants” crisis which fortunately was solved easily. Last time this happened, he had packed a brand new dress suit carefully in his suit bag, got to the conference, crashed in a friend’s room before his room was ready, then could not find his pants about an hour before the very important presentation.

He called me demanding to know if I had packed his dress pants. “Where are my PANTS?!? Did you pack them?”

It was the stress, really. He was nervous about the possibility of picking up a very prestigious award, and about maybe having to make an acceptance speech.

I reminded him that he’d packed up his suit bag very methodically with the brand new suit, and while I was checking the closet here just in case, he remembered the part about the friend’s room, tracked him down, and found his pants hanging in the closet.

Pants crisis: resolved.

Last night, it was more of a laundry/underwear crisis, much more easily fixed. There was clean laundry in baskets, but none of them seemed to contain socks and underwear. Keep in mind that we just got moved back into the master bedroom after more than 3 weeks, camping out in the guest room while we worked on our “3 day flooring project.” Our first night back in our own bed was Saturday, and the drawers which had been stacked up in the middle of the room had all be replaced in the dressers, thank GAWD, but there were still several laundry baskets that needed to be folded and put away.

There always are, I think they breed.

Anyway, David had clearly been searching frantically for his oddments of male netherwear when he shouted down from above “I can’t find any UNDERPANTS! ARRRGH!”

Stress, again: this time, it’s the plain old “early flight tomorrow, don’t want to forget anything, meanwhile I’m giving a presentation before the opening session” variety.

Soon enough, after we went through some baskets and checked the dresser drawers (which may have had stuff misfiled in them during the time they were stacked in the middle of the room), the Great Underpants Crisis of Nought ’10 was over. It was nervewracking and there was the distinct possibility that one of us would have to run out and get a 3-pack of white knittery, but fortunately it wasn’t necessary.

So David is off in Orlando, and I’m here for the beginning of the work week thinking about tasks and chores that I’d like to do, but that will probably get blown off if I’m not careful.

Believe it or not, blogging is a task AND a chore, because I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging lately what with how easy it is to just tweet something, and how hard it is to blog something with the iPhone now that both of my little bookmarklets stopped working. Anything seen during the normal workday is either a quick and easy tweet, a moblog picture (another dead easy function set up via Flickr), a del.icio.us link, or not at all, as it’s no longer a simple thing to pick up a link with WordPress’ “Press This” javascript functionality on the iPhone (although it still works perfectly on a desktop machine). I’m not sure why, actually; it may be a security “feature” stemming from some update or other. I didn’t want to bother David with it yesterday since he was trying to get all his stuff ready and packed, and it can certainly wait for his return.

Anyway, there it is; it’s not easy to blog using WordPress’ own iPhone app, as I just commented on Tiny Screenfuls, yet it’s easy to send a post to WordPress via Flickr, del.icio.us, or Google Reader if you set them up with the right permissions (and in Flickr’s case, a template that applies my beloved CSS drop shadows).

Why can’t WordPress’s app grab a link, for gosh sakes? Why did my handy Press This app stop working right? Grr.

Anyway, my hour of blogging is over, but there’s still a bit more to discuss: my accomplishment of mission.

We had a family member’s discarded laptop, which David got several weeks ago at a family gathering, that he was going to “part out.” After some tinkering around, however, he got it working, but we forgot to take it with us a couple of weekends ago when we met up as a family to visit our young nephew in college for lunch. Darn! So after missing another opportunity to get the now-working laptop back to its home, I managed to meet up this morning after church, although it might have worked to drop it off in the down time I had between O’Hare (5:15 AM) and church (8:15 AM). But no, it worked out fine to meet afterwards, although to make it happen I had to navigate to a shopping mall in Vernon Hills… AND deal with an escalator (I have a weird perception problem that makes it hard to use down escalators, and I tend to balk and head for the nearest elevator to avoid it). Found my family members at the designated drop point, exchanged signs and countersigns (“Hi, you guys!” and “Hey, you made it”), and handed over the laptop.

I thought I had a schedule conflict and couldn’t stay for lunch, but the conflict evaporated, drat it. So: Noodles & Company for me. Later tonight, leftovers. And that’s a little over an hour of righteous, linky-loving blogging.

And thus endeth the post, thanks be to Gawd.