Archive for July, 2007
Busy day
July 28th, 2007
Boy, I’ve got a lot going on today. Well, a lot for me. Fortunately the two events that took me out of the house are done.
Many years ago, I signed up for a safety deposit box with my best friend and her husband. Shortly thereafter, they bought a fireproof safe, leaving to pay the box fee by myself. I wanted to close out the account, but was told all three of us needed to be present. Finally, I got them to come with me to the bank. (It only took 2 months to get a them to put it on their schedule!) Then, turns out I was the only one who had to sign anything. Go figure.
Then, I had to get my hair cut (& colored). I always manage to lose my little appointment cards, so I never know exactly when my appointment is. But usually, some day during the week I notice my gray hairs are showing at the roots. And sure enough, that Friday I get the notice that my appointment is that Saturday. Man, I’m good. 
And now, I’m off to participate in this year’s Blogathon by commenting and encouraging those who are blogging for 24 hours straight. It was one of my blogging goals for 2007. Then I got all excited and kind of wanted to blog in the blogathon. I even came up with a couple of themes to blog about. (I thought I’d written a post about it, but can’t seem to find it. Maybe it’s still up there in draft status. Well, kinda late to publish it now.) But I know I can’t stay up for 24 hours. I sort of wish they had an 18-hour option. Now that I could do. Maybe I’ll suggest it to the organizers next year.
Anyway, now I’m off to see what brave souls are out there, raising money for worthwhile charities.
Posted in Blogging, General | Comments (0)
Thursday Thirteen: 13 items in my grocery cart
July 26th, 2007
It’s Thursday already? Cripes, where did the week go?
I went to the grocery store yesterday. I had only a couple of things I needed to buy, yet I ended up spending over $80. So what the heck was in the cart?
- Red leaf lettuce
- Red seedless grapes
- 1 cucumber
- 2 bananas
- Pork chops (yum!)
- Skim milk, 1 gallon (yes, I can drink 1 gallon of milk all by myself before it goes bad)
- Low fat cottage cheese (I like it, ok?)
- Bag o’ carrettes
- Crystal Lite Raspberry Green Tea
- 5 cans of Lil Friskees cat food (3 salmon, 2 captain’s choice, because “We will fuss if we don’t get what we want, even though we have pitifully few taste buds.”)
- Cat litter
- 1/2 gallon Breyers lite mint chocolate chip ice cream—hey, it jumped into my cart all by itself!
- ABC Soaps In Depth. Because I’m an idiot.
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Supernatual; episodes 1.03 & 1.04
July 21st, 2007
The next two episodes are pretty much stand-alone episodes, but they do provide a few hints into the characters’ psyches.
Dead in the Water continues to be one of my favorites. Dean bonds with a young boy who has gone mute after witnessing a mysterious drowning. Having also witnessed a traumatic event in his own childhood, Dean tells the boy about how his mother’s memory motivates him. This is the first time Sam has seen Dean’s deeper side; but when he asks Dean about it, Dean brushes him off, returning to his stoic, macho facade.
Sam is still having trouble sleeping as Phantom Traveler begins. Dean is contacted by a man, Jerry, he and his father had helped a few years before. Jerry has found some unusual noises on a recording from a plane crash. When they meet, Jerry tells Sam about how proud his dad was of him. Sam is surprised, because the two of them fought constantly before Sam left for college, leaving Sam to believe his father didn’t want him to go.
On a lighter note, we learn that Dean is afraid of flying. It makes for some humorous moments, and is mentioned in Everybody Loves a Clown.
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Thursday Thirteen: 13 items on my office desk
July 19th, 2007
I wrote this post on Monday, so there have been some slight changes, which I’ll note. These are items that are in plain view, not hidden behind closed shelves or shoved in drawers.
- A wicker-esque basket that contains a bunch of writing implements (pens, pencils, dry-erase markers, highlighters)
- A wooden name plate that a former co-worker made for me. He made it as a prototype to decide if he wanted to get into woodworking or not. It’s in the shape of a cat, and painted to resemble a gray tabby. And it’s one of the best things he ever made.
- A coffee cup with the Navy officer emblem and the crest of the command I worked for at the time (Naval Telecommunications Command, or NAVTELCOM). The command went through numerous changes in the ensuing years and is no longer in existence.
- Mardi gras bead that a friend who lives in Louisiana (but not New Orleans) gave to me.
- A gyroscope from a defunct Navy torpedo. It’s mounted on a plaque and was given to me as a going away gift. (There’s a long story associated with it. Perhaps I’ll tell the story some time.)
- A 3″x5″ acrylic paper holder filled with multi-colored sheets with my name imprinted at the top.
- A water bottle, currently half full. (Now it’s less than 1/4 full. No, not the same bottle, but a water bottle none-the-less.)
- A 20 oz coffee cup, currently about one-third full. (Today it’s only 16 oz since I’m leaving earlier than usual.)
- An “office voodoo kit.” The kit includes a small doll with a man on one side, a woman on the other, and two pins. It came with an instruction booklet and is to be used on bosses, coworkers or anyone else who pisses me off.
- My brand new DayTimer. I down-sized so that I could carry the planner in my purse, but I’m not sure I like the format. I’ll give it some time, though. I’ve used Day Timers for many years, not always successfully. I have a PDA somewhere at home, but never got into the habit of using it, and now I’m not allowed to bring it into the building I work in.
- A small fan, almost always running.
- A picture of my “niblings,” my 2 nephews and niece. My niece saw it and exclaimed, “That’s an old picture.” To which I replied, “Yeah, but you still look the same.”
- A box of Kleenix, an absolute necessity for my crappy sinuses (which my co-workers often use without asking permission. Hmmm. See item #9.)
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How do you like my new look?
July 18th, 2007
I’d been planning on doing a “stream” theme for a while now, but just hadn’t thought I was ready to jump in feet first. Finally, I was given a little push by Lorelle to at least do something to make my blog design unique, however small it might be. Thus, now was the time dive in, ready or not.
Initially, I’d looked for photos of both streams and showers. But the showers all seemed to have people in them, and since this is not that kind of blog, I went with the stream photos. 
I’ve been trying to create a theme from scratch, but it still needs quite a bit of work. So, in an effort to get my unique look in place more quickly, I took one of my favorite themes, Falling Leaves by Shawn Grimes, and modified it quite a bit. (I’d direct you to Shawn’s website, but it has apparently gone to domain name heaven.) I changed most of the coloring, added a heading style, created a couple new graphics, and even got brave enough to go into the sidebar template and modify some of the php.
It’s interesting when you think you’ve found the perfect theme, it always surprises you in ways you never expected. I like having the tag line in the header and a navigation sidebar on every page. I thought this theme had the latter, but once I set it up, I found the sidebar elements are not the same for all views. I’ve tried a few times to fix it, but so far my attempts have been unsuccessful, seeing as how my PHP skillz are lacking.
Then there was the list predicament. The theme eliminated all list styles, for both ordered and unordered lists (except for unordered nested lists). Now, why would one do that, especially for ordered lists? The reason they’re ordered is because they need to be numbered. And how would my “Thursday Thirteen” look without the numbers? You might not know that I only had 9 items! The good news is that I now have the numbers for my ordered lists. Now I just need to figure out how to itemize a post’s unordered lists.
It’s always something, isn’t it?
Posted in Blogging | Comments (3)
Supernatural; episodes 1.01 & 1.02
July 15th, 2007
With the hope of getting new Supernatural viewers for season 3, I thought it might be a good idea to provide a bit of the history of the show. While you can enjoy the show without knowing its history, being aware of the backstory helps in understanding the characters’ personalities and motivations.
Over the course of the next 11 or 12 weeks, I’m going to try to summarize the Supernatural backstory. I don’t plan to write episode summaries per se; rather, I want to concentrate on the events that carry over from one episode to another, such as the brothers’ relationship and what drives each of them. So, let me start…
Meet the Winchesters
In the Pilot, John and Mary Winchester are a young couple from Lawrence, Kansas, Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Couch Critic, Supernatural | Comments (0)
Blog Challenge: The story of my blog
July 9th, 2007
I mentioned this weekend that I was going to participate in this week’s blog challenge from Lorelle on WordPress. The challenge is to tell the story of my blog: how I got started, why I started, where I started, where I ended up, et cetera, et cetera, etc.
My very first blog was at Bravenet. I started the blog in response to being (unfairly!) kicked out of a message board community, so I started the blog to tell the world my opinions. I’m embarrassed to say what the topic was. (Is there an emoticon for blush?) Yeah, it was a little egotistical, I suppose, but really, I just needed a place to air my comments, and the blog was a good place to do that. And while Bravenet had a community that encouraged blog commenting and “cross-pollination,” I just felt a little restless. Perhaps it was because I wanted to blog on more topics, and just didn’t feel that was the place to do it.
I wandered through the blog wilderness for quite a while. I looked at a few places like Blogger, but I settled on (the stand-alone) WordPress fairly quickly. (This was in the days of WordPress 1.5.) And in trying to figure out WordPress’s inner workings, I stumbled upon Lorelle on WordPress. But Lorelle also piqued my interest in WordPress.com, so I opened an account there. (I’ve since closed it because I like the freedom that the stand-alone WP provides, and I had too many dang blogs anyway.)
And even with this blog, I started & scrapped it more times than I care to admit. I kept thinking it had to be perfect, I had to have my niche figured out and know exactly where I was headed. But I finally realized that if I didn’t just jump in, I might never get anywhere.
I still have too many blogs. I started one at LiveJournal because it has a very active community that shares my current obsession interest. And I thought this blog was too serious to discuss such frivolous things as television shows. But I recently decided that my blog can be like me, both sensible and irreverent.
What’s next for the blog? Well, I want to change the theme to more appropriately match the title. I have lots of stream pictures that would be fun to share. And I want to give it its own URL. And of course, there’s all the other entries in my 2007 blogging goals.
Posted in Blogging | Comments (1)
Oh Lorelle, how I’ve missed you!
July 8th, 2007
I have been remiss not only in updating my blog, but also in furthering my blogging education. Finally this weekend, I went back to read my favorite blogstress, Lorelle on Wordpress, and boy, have I missed a bunch! (But then, with Lorelle, if you miss a day, you’ve usually missed something worthwhile and useful.)
I was actually looking for something specific (how to add a page to let new comment authors know their post is being held for moderation), but couldn’t find it. I’m sure that if I keep on reading her blog, the topic will come up again; as will how to hide subpages until the main page is selected, which I also want to incorporate here.
However, I did find a couple to great articles worth my time. One is this week’s blog challenge, which is to write about why I started blogging. I can do that very easily as I’ve done it several time already.
The other was the announcement of the blogging marathon to take place on July 28th. One of my goals for this year is to participate in a marathon. Since my health doesn’t really allow me to stay up all night, I thought I’d support by actively commenting on the marathoners’ blogs.
Except that now I’ve come up with a couple of ideas that could be used in a blog marathon. Maybe I could blog on my own for, say, 18 hours, but I think that’d take away from those that are “running” the whole marathon. Besides, my goal was to actively comment, not blog. So I really ought to stick with my goals rather than try to bite off more than I can chew.
However, I think I’ll take one of my marathon ideas and write about it on a weekly basis; and that is to write a serialized synopsis of the tv show Supernatural. Perhaps I can provide a “story so far” series in hopes of getting new viewers to start watching the 3rd season without being too far out of the loop. I’d sort of tried this at my LiveJournal blog, but I think in support of 2007 goal #3, incorporate my blogs, I’ll go ahead move my Supernatural obsession addiction discussions over here.
Posted in Blogging, Couch Critic | Comments (1)