Tale of a Shooting Star…

No, I’m not talking about stitching as exercise. 🙂 Terry and I went to the driving range last night for an hour. Since it’s been probably 9 months or more since I last hit a golf ball, I had pretty much forgotten all of the technique that I had previously developed (if you can even call it that). So, for starting from scratch, I hit a couple of very nice shots… every once in a blue moon. I’ll have to set up the nets in the back yard and start practicing at home again.

Surprisingly, I’m not very sore today. I figured I would be, but I’m just a bit stiff. Nothing some regular, mild stretching won’t fix and I don’t even feel the need to take anything, which is amazing for me. Now if I can just get the painful red spot on each thumb to die down, I’ll be in good shape. At least the blisters don’t seem to have filled up, so I think they’ll heal and go away. And yes, for the record, I do use a glove on the left hand. The blisters are on the right hand, making me wonder if I need to either switch hands with the glove or have one on each…

And now for the pet peeve rant. Or not… [long rant about web design deleted] I’m just not going to get into it and I would hate to offend people unnecessarily, so nevermind. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to express my frustration without risk. In the meantime, suffice it to say that I am really tired of wasting my time redoing the work of people who claim to know what they are doing! I’d be much better off doing it myself. *sigh* It would certainly take a lot less time than having to repeatedly hold people’s hands and then to try to make sense of what they’ve attempted to do in order to fix everything before it’s usable. It’s a serious case of too many people with too few skills, too great a desire to learn something that they apparently cannot and too big of an ego to admit defeat. Just please don’t tell me that you know HTML when you can barely use a WSIWYG editor and have no idea how to clean up the actual HTML produced! 🙂

“It’s that time of year to take our annual senior citizen test.”
Exercise of the brain is as important as exercise of the muscles. As we grow older, it’s important that we keep mentally alert, The saying; “If you don’t use it, you will lose it” also applies to the brain, so… Below is a very private way to gauge your loss or non-loss of intelligence. So, take the following test presented here and determine if you are losin it or are still “with it.” The spaces below are so you don’t see the answers until you have made your answer.

OK, relax, clear your mind and… begin.

WELL MAYBE NOT THAT CLEAR!

1. What do you put in a toaster?

Answer: “bread.”? If you said “toast,” then give up now and go do something else. Try not to hurt yourself. If you said, “bread,” go to Question 2.

2. Say “silk” five times. Now spell “silk.” What do cows drink?

Answer: Cows drink water. If you said “milk,” please do not attempt the next question. Your brain is obviously over stressed and may even overheat. It may be that you need to content yourself with reading something more appropriate such as Children’s World. If you said “water” then proceed to question 3.

3. If a red house is made from red bricks and a blue house is made from blue bricks and a pink house is made from pink bricks and a black house is made from black bricks, what is a green house made from?

Answer: Greenhouses are made from glass. If you said “green bricks,” what the devil are you still doing here reading these questions? If you said “glass,” then go on to Question 4.

4. It’s twenty years ago, and a plane is flying at 20,000 feet over Germany (If you will recall, Germany at the time was politically divided i! nto West Germany and East Germany.) Anyway, during the flight, TWO of the engines fail. The pilot, realizing that the last remaining engine is also failing, decides on a crash landing procedure. Unfortunately the engine fails before he has time and the plane fatally crashes smack in the middle of “no man’s land” between East Germany and
West Germany. Where would you bury the survivors??? East Germany or West Germany or in “no man’s land”?

Answer: You don’t, of course, bury survivors.

If you said ANYTHING else, you are a real dunce and you must NEVER try to rescue anyone from a plane crash. Your efforts would not be appreciated. If you said, “Don’t bury the survivors”, then proceed to the next question.

5. Without using a calculator – You are driving a bus from London to Milford Haven in Wales. In London, 17 people get on the bus. In Reading, six people get off the bus and nine people get on. In Swindon, two people get off and four get on. In Cardiff, 11 people get off and 16 people get on. In Swansea, three people get off and five people get on. In Carmathen, six people get off and three get on. You then arrive at Milford Haven. What was the name of the bus driver?

Answer: Oh, for crying out loud!??

Don’t you remember your own name?? It was YOU!!

I have to say, I can’t decide whether it seems like I’ve been blogging for longer or if it seems like I started just yesterday. Whatever the case may be, my first blog entry was entered one year ago today. We’ll see if the blogging trend in general continues, but I have enjoyed posting bits and pieces of myself out on the web. Now, if only anyone was reading! LOL.

Just for kicks, I’ll post a link to that fateful first entry. Keep in mind that everything between that and October 18th of last year was lost in a backup blunder, but I still had a text file with the first entry in it, so I was able to put it back when the chaos died down.

Be forewarned… this first entry was one heck of a rant. 🙂

Ahhh… our loving, neurotic little furbaby strikes again. She woke me up early this morning by planting herself on my chest and licking my face. She was trembling, so I rolled over and told Terry that she needed to go outside. He got up and took her downstairs, but I never heard the back door open (we have a bell on it for her to use, even though she doesn’t). Just then I hear some thunder. Terry comes back up with Phoebe and announces that she must be afraid of the storm that’s coming.

She gets a little apprehensive about thunder, but this was ridiculous! She would not let me go back to sleep as this annoyingly long storm took its sweet time rolling through. At some point, I got up and went downstairs so that I could give her some of her calming supplement to see if it would help (she hadn’t had her usual dose yesterday morning or before bed). The periods of thunder in this storm were LONG. I have never heard such long, extended, continuous rolls of thunder in my life, honestly. As it came closer and closer, I could start to see the lightning through the closed blinds and the long peals of thunder grew louder. Of course, this just agitated Phoebe even more, just when she had started to settle down and I was dozing off. To top it all off, just then the alarm sounded. Ugh!

Oh, no wait, to top it ALL off, I had been wrestling with a headache for most of the day on Sunday and through the entire night. I had such exquisite pain when I finally got up and into the shower this morning, I tell you! Terry rolled over and apologized at one point this morning and I just told him “It’s all part of being a mom.” And it truly is. It doesn’t matter if your kids are fuzzy or fleshy, they still get scared when a thunderstorm arrives and want to cuddle with mom and dad.

Okay, so I’ve actually managed to watch this movie twice in the past week. The first time was out of sheer desperation due to an absolute lack of ANYTHING else on TV. It was at night and the movie just hit us as being funny in the worst possible way. The language is a bit much at some points and the frontal nudity is way too much for me, but overall the slapstick, stupid, situational, stoner humor will make you laugh until tears leak out of your eyes. The extreme mix tape in the truck of the poser gang is the best, but I would hate to spoil anything for anyone. 🙂

Apparently, it was funny enough that we decided to watch it again when we finished watched Leslie Nielson’s Wrongfully Accused and were looking for something else. Leslie Nielson is a little too slapstick and A LOT too stupid for me, unless I’m in exactly the right mood, but Harold and Kumar fit the bill after all of the complete mindlessness.

I never would have gone to see it in the theater, but for me, it’s definitely worth watching when nothing else is on. Okay, maybe even a little better than that. Not quite repeat-worthy like Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, as I could probably watch that movie at least once a week for the rest of my life.

Too bad Harold and Kumar is now over and we’re back to nothing on TV. Someone tell me why we pay so much for so many channels to not have anything to watch when we truly need it? I guess that’s why they make DVDs.

Phoebe let me clip two nails this morning – the last two absolutely needed for now. I will probably continue to clip, as it has taken weeks to get everything clipped and the older ones are starting to grow out. But at least they won’t get a chance to start to curl before I get to them now.

The one nail a morning system ended up working really well. I’m not sure if any of it relates back to the supplements we’ve been giving her or if it’s just the fact that we’ve established a routine and she knows what to expect now. I even clipped one nail too short on Friday morning and it bled. Fortunately, I bought a styptic (sp?) gel a few months ago just in case, so we were able to stop the bleeding quickly. And she still let me cut two this morning. Fortunately, her phobia doesn’t seem to be getting any worse (knock on wood). She may not love it, but she at least puts up with it. It’s to the point where she actually won’t leave the bedroom in the morning to come down and go outside because she knows she gets a nail clipped first. LOL.

Whatever works. I wish the whole process was a little easier… maybe in time.

Okay, so the actual upgrade didn’t actually take me very long. I’ve been spending most of this time surfing the web and applying a publicly available theme to my blog. The one I have up right now is Ocadia by Becca Wei. It encompasses several of the major design points that I want to hit when I finally have some time to create my own custom theme for this place. In the meantime, Becca’s theme will do beautifully. 😀

I may actually take a few moments to change the colors to shades of purple sometime in the near future. Otherwise, the custom graphics creation and figuring out how to work with the WordPress templates will have to wait. Before that, I need to finish creating the graphics for my mother’s storefront and then I have to make myself dig into trying to create the new layout I have envisioned for my personal site. Once my personal site is redesigned, I can apply those layout concepts across to my blog and my photo gallery.

For now, though, I’m happy where I am, as I’ve made huge strides towards my ultimate destination tonight.

I have several changes for my blog planned now. First, I changed the name (again) to Tale of a Shooting Star…. This should be the last name change, as I put a lot of thought energy into developing a name that would be cute, durable and would reflect me fairly succinctly. So, there you have it. Next I’ll cook up a description that accomplishes the same thing. Suggestions will be accepted.

Tonight or sometime this weekend, I will be upgrading the underlying software from WordPress 1.2 to WordPress 1.5. Once I have accomplished this (with careful, full backups before doing so), I will be able to fully customize the look and feel of my blog. I’ve been looking through other people’s blogs (mostly hosted on Blogspot, interestingly enough) and a bunch of themes built on top of WordPress 1.5, so I have a decent idea of what I want to do.

The next step will require some serious time in front of my computer upstairs, plugging away at Photoshop, in order to create the graphics that I want. Which probably won’t be a big deal, but always seems daunting initially.

Okay, time to back this puppy up…