bookmark_borderA Long Time Bloggin’

I realized the other day that I have been online “blogging” for over ten years now. I remember the first time I heard of it. I was hanging out online at a writers forum called “Forward Motion“. Most folks back then were using LiveJournal or one of the others. I poked around with all of that for a short while but didn’t like being locked in to a box that wasn’t mine or mine to control.

So I learned html and tables and made my own dang box! It was ugly but it worked for me. I had my own website anyway by then (good ol’ holyroller.org) and I just put it there. I eventually learned a little bit of CSS and used that as the basic template. After several years of that (yes, years), I stumbled across WordPress with my web host and switched to that. Open source? Done! Copy/paste-ing all that stuff was a major PITA but I did it. Nearly all of it is here. Somewhere in all my files is the original html files. I shudder to look at the mess it was. I think I may be missing some here and there. December of ’03 starts rather abrupt. There’s got to be some missing.

Most of what I wrote in this blog thing was for myself. Noting down progress or the lack thereof. Being accountable to my invisible minions. I don’t think anyone but me was reading it. They told me it was a web log, shortened down to the word “blog”. So, that’s what I made it. A log. Part diary, part daily log.

bookmark_borderBrain Cells vs Space Time Continuum Thingy

Guess which one won?

Okay, so I get that when we look at starlight, it is starlight that first left the star a long time ago. I get that. The star could be blown up into smithereens but we don’t know that yet because the light from it hasn’t gotten here yet. I get that, too. The following is from a LiveScience article about a “Giant ‘Blob’ Found in Outer Space“. It’s a cool article with puzzling questions with no answers. Yet.

A strange giant space “blob” spotted when the universe was relatively young has got astronomers puzzled. Using space and ground telescopes, astronomers looked back to when the universe was only 800 million years old and found something that was out of proportion and out of time.

(…)

Ouchi and Ellis said one possibility is that by chance, astronomers captured the moment a galaxy was forming in the early universe — something that never has been seen before.

As astronomers gaze deeper into space, they are looking farther back in time. What Ouchi found was from 12.9 billion years ago. Only three other objects have been seen that are from deeper in time and space.

Now, didn’t that just fry a few more brain cells? So, like, the further we are able to look into space–other universes and stuff–the further back into time we are seeing. But, wouldn’t we really be seeing the future? No, that’s not right. If my imaginary star blew up yesterday, I’d not know it until 300 yrs from now because it is 300 light years away. But by aiming a really strong light at it…Oh, Wait….I think I got it….We are looking back in time because what we are seeing happened 300 yrs ago. And the further into space we can look, the further away the light source, so the further back into time we go.

Ouch, there went another one.

I think I will write Fantasy novels and leave the SciFi to those who can grasp these concepts long enough to make them real in their manuscript.

bookmark_borderSigns of Spring

Ah, Spring is here!

And it brought along the sneezing and watery eyes.

But there’s other, more subtle signs, at least here at our house.

In the unheated bathroom, the shampoo comes out of the bottle with less effort. No more squeezing hard gel or warming the bottle in the shower’s spray first. And the adjustment of hot and cold water is changing. We aren’t quite turning the hot water level down but are definitely turning the cold water down less.

And today another major sign appeared: I got a haircut. Lorna took the shears and trimmed my hair down to 1″. I let my hair grow longer in the Winter. For one it’s too cold to sit out on the back porch to while Lorna cuts my hair. I used to have long hair, as in all the way down to my butt long. But I got tired of the knots and the flying hair when the window was down so off it came. I wish I had known about Locks of Love back then.

bookmark_borderBoo-Boo

I got a boo-boo, an owie, a #$%&@.

We live in an old house and have not been able to do much with it since we bought it back in ’92. In the long list of things to fix, the third thing on the list is the front door. The door frame is so freakin’ warped. Nothing is straight in this house except the critters. Prior to us buying this money pit, someone tried to “fix” the door frame by putting up metal-backed strips of fuzzy insulation to try and stop the draft around the edges. Most of that we’ve removed or hammered down. But it seems there’s a piece that’s worked it’s way back up. I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow while letting Mike out on the long lead (16′ leash) to greet Lorna, I got tangled up in the leash and two other dogs. My arm was pressed against and scraped along the door frame.

We have a code phrase for when a boo-boo is bad enough that an extra hand is needed or whatever. We say “meet me in the bathroom”. This usually means blood is flowing. It gets the other person to slip into the right frame of mind. The bathroom is near the cabinet where we keep our bandages and other wound supplies.

As you can guess from the photo above, it wasn’t pretty. I looked down and at first just saw white skin from the scrape and figured all was sore but fine. Then I saw blood starting to pour. I said “meet me in the bathroom”. I went there and started running cold water over it to rinse it while Lorna got the dogs in. She joined me quickly and cleaned it up. We saw it wasn’t a deep cut, just an angry one. We also discussed when did I last have a tetanus shot. It’s an awkward place to bandage so we’re just letting it air out.

By the time we fed the dogs and went out to take care of some things, the arm was on fire. It’s how my body deals with injuries. It was during dinner that the initial irritation calmed down and we could see the other scratches. I’ll survive, but boy howdee, did I do a good job or what?! The flash from the camera removed the smaller scratches and the redness doesn’t show up at all. So much for the gore, dangit.

This scar will join so many others on that arm. The two tornado shaped ones from Kev’s chickens when we were kids. The long one on the top of the wrist from a burn/cut gotten from a Flexi-lead cord (that one hurt like the beejeebers!). Then there’s the one from the Jeep door cut while on vacation. The bite scars from Jake chewing my hand (I still have problems with the ring finger). It’s also the arm with the Bible Bump (ganglion cyst), the chronically out-of-joint thumb, the ulna nerve damage, and various other weirdness. All of this is from the elbow down! I’m such a freakin’ mess, ain’t I?

bookmark_borderDaylight Savings Time Begins

For those of us who must follow the arcane ritual known as Daylight Savings Time, tonight is the night! Spring Forward and all that means that at 2 a.m. Sunday morning, POOF! it becomes 3 a.m. Sunday morning.

Maybe all that dark matter slowly tearing the universe apart is that missing hour. Rips in the space/time/common sense continuum.

Either that or I need more chocolate milk.

Oh! Don’t forget to change the batteries in all your smoke detectors, fire alarms, and/or carbon monoxide detectors. And if you don’t have any of those, are you nuts?!

Linkages:

bookmark_borderShoe Shopping

I hate shopping for shoes. I really do. And this is why:

If I go to get a pair of jeans and I know I wear 28″ waist with 29″ inseam, then I know that any pair of jeans I pick up that says 28×29 are, well, going to be 28×29. That’s not the way with shoes. This shoe is too small and it’s an 8. This shoe fits and it’s an 8. That shoe is like, way big and it’s an 8. SAME SIZE!!

And now they went and changed the width stuff.

In women’s shoes (which I don’t/can’t wear), size 8D means it is 8 Wide. 8 2E is size 8 double wide. In men’s shoes, 8D means 8 Medium. 8 2E is 8 Wide.

Arrgghh!

At least now that I’m mostly using a wheelchair, I only need to get shoes once every two years or so. Except when a certain Shepweiler (rottweiler/german shepherd pup named Mike) decides shoes are tasty and make good teething objects and really fly when tossed by the string.

For years, I have worn Thom McCans. I love those shoes and they were in Kmart (vs the evil Walmart). But a few years ago, they changed the style and they aren’t as comfortable. When I walked more, these were the only shoes to survive past 3 months. My pronation or whatever it is can wear down shoes in now time flat. Thom McCans make excellent dress shoes and I wore Saucony sneakers. But the place we went to today seemed to be lacking in Saucony shoes in my size (whatever size of the moment they happened to be) so I went wandering about in the men’s shoes while Lorna wandered in the women’s section.

I found some hiking shoes that I fell in lust with. They’re by Merrell. Lorna called (to make sure I hadn’t killed anyone) while I was looking at them and I told her to look to see if there were any in women’s. She found me a few minutes later and had fallen madly in lust with a pair of her own. She got the women’s Phaser Rush and I got the men’s Pantheon. She also got a pair of Saucony’s.

I don’t know how long we were there. We’d shopped together for a while but drifted apart in the madness that is shoe shopping. We like the store (Discount Shoes out on Brevard Road) because they are so freakin’ big that we have a good chance of finding something we like. They ought to have a hot dog stand in there, though.