Inane Chatter » website

Pre-vacation brain drain

Zannah — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:10:12 +0000

My brain is starting to shut down. Work was hard today, and tomorrow I’m going to be mostly useless. You know why? I’m going on vacation! Woo! Not a long one, but it should be nice and relaxing. The worst part (and I’m telling you this in advance to try and prepare you for this traumatic experience) is that there is NO INTERNET CONNECTION where I’m going. I will have to skip updating this here blog for several days IN A ROW. Blog aside, what am I going to do without the Internet? Here’s where I realize I may have a problem. Do I really think I’m going to be scarred for life if I can’t google the lyrics to that song on the radio or find out what weather.com says the temperature is rightnow for a couple of days? I think I’ll manage somehow. And when I come back, I’ll have lots of pictures.

But hey, the withdrawal doesn’t have to start just yet. My vacation doesn’t start until the weekend. According to my brain, however, it started around lunchtime today. Ooh, that reminds me of breakfast today. A guy on my project won breakfast for the office from Chick-fil-A! That place might have the best fast food breakfast in the world. They certainly have the best fast food chicken sandwiches in the world. And since that’s basically what goes on their breakfast menu, I think they’ve got the breakfast trophy all sewn up. Which reminds me…I used the phrase “hungry as all get out” the other day, and that made me wonder where “as all get out” came from. I was driving just then, so I couldn’t google it, and I’ve only just remembered.

[Pause for googling]

Okay, according to one forum, the OED says it was first used in Huckleberry Finn in 1884. I couldn’t find any other references to the origin of that phrase, and I don’t have access to an OED myself (and I don’t subscribe to OED Online, although maybe I should – mm, no, $30 a month), so I can’t check. That’s not very helpful. Maybe I’ll be just fine after a few days without Google. (Look! I can tie things together! (Oh, is it not cool to point that kind of thing out? Better to be subtle and let others notice on their own? Oops. Guess I’m not cool.))

Productivity is my middle name

Zannah — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 02:09:20 +0000

It rained all night last night. A welcome change, and really soothing to fall asleep to (several times, since I woke up a few times last night). We woke up at 7 this morning to find it still pouring, so running was out of the question. We found ourselves breakfasted and in the basement before 9am, and we spent a good hour making some donation and trash decisions. We’re not done getting rid of the crap in the basement, not by a long shot, but we made a sizable dent. (That looks weird. Sizable. Sizeable? Still weird.) Around 10:30, I went to Costco for Roxy’s medicine and then to Target (yeah, I know – again), and I was supposed to be home before noon so we could leave at noon to meet Erik and Margaret for lunch and a movie. Well, you know how Target is. I got sucked in, and it was almost noon when I got in the car to come home and get John. So we were late. I hate being late, but this time I can’t blame anyone by myself (sorry again, guys!). It didn’t help that I got off the toll road going the wrong way on 7 and had to turn around and THEN wade through the normal traffic in the area. Lunch (at Maggiano’s) was good, but it was more about catching up with E&M, who we hadn’t seen since mid-May, and that was much-needed and much fun. After the movie (Knight and Day – the first half was funny and pretty entertaining. The second half was okay, but less fun.), I bought a new wallet (a nice red, big, adult-type wallet to replace my falling-apart, overstuffed, tiny little wallet that gets lost in my purse and was meant to only hold the bare necessities but got drafted into full-time use because I don’t know why), and we came home, checked on the dogs (they’re fine), and did geeky website things together (I updated my Pages section. See?). Tomorrow might not be so productive, but you never know.

WASP! – Now with flowers

Zannah — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:48:18 +0000

We have a wasp’s nest just outside the garage door. A baby wasp’s nest. A nest for baby wasps. (Not really. Actually, that, too.) It looks like it’s just the beginning of a nest, so it’s still really small. There were about five wasps crawling on it and I refused to get close enough to find out what kind of wasps they are. I looked up how to get rid of them and that’s almost as scary as leaving them there. Apparently, the first thing you’re supposed to do it go make sure you’re not allergic to wasp stings. If you are, call an exterminator. If you’re not, go buy a pressurized can of wasp killer/poison, wear multiple layers with long sleeves and long pants, tuck your pants into your shoes, tuck your sleeves into your gloves (wear gloves), and wear a hat and goggles. Oh, and it’s suggested that your top layer be something non-permeable, like rubber. Wait until dark and spray the hell out of the nest. You’re also supposed to make sure you have an escape route just in case you don’t aim very well or the poison doesn’t act fast enough and you end up with a swarm of angry wasps chasing you. I wish I were making this stuff up. Just google it. I want nothing to do with this.

In other news…am I fixed? It looks like it on every browser and every computer I have access to, but I no longer trust that. If it looks weird to you (no picture, tag line in the wrong place, etc), please let me know. John found a way to make it work again, but it’s not the right way. Of course, it is, it works, but we can find no earthly reason why it wasn’t working before. I’ve compared my CSS file to the original one, before I tinkered with it, and we don’t see any differences. But hey, it works (I think), and I still might tinker with changing the look over the weekend. This whole thing started because I wanted to change the picture, and I still want to do that, so we’ll see what happens.

So John is wonderful (I don’t say that enough), not only because he fixed my website, but also because he came home with flowers for me today. He stopped to buy wasp killer, but the store didn’t have it. Instead, he bought ice cream (for himself – I swore off ice cream when I quit eating pound cake) and flowers for me. ‘Cause that’s what you do when they’re out of wasp killer. Or that’s what you do when you know you can’t immediately kill the wasps that are threatening your wife. I love flowers.

What the hell? – Update: still broken – Update #2: miracle?

Zannah — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:41:34 +0000

I seem to have broken my header picture. I was trying to change it to something closer to summer than spring, and nothing looked quite right (but it was working), so I tried to put the flowers back. Not working. The file is in the right folder (I didn’t move it out), it’s the right size (I didn’t change it), and it’s in my stylesheet with the right file name, but it’s not showing up on the screen. Gah. I already had a headache. This isn’t helping.

Update: Now the picture and the tag line are broken. I need to update the template and my version of WordPress, and while I’m at it, I might just change the way the whole site looks. I’m too irritated to do any of that now, plus it’ll keep me up later than I want to be up, and I’ll just get more and more irritated if I know I’m going to be exhausted tomorrow because I’m up fixing this, so I’m putting it off. I’m irritated just thinking about it. I’m irritated about my repeated use of the word “irritated”. Ugh.

So. Calm, relaxing, deep breaths. I can fix this tomorrow.

Update #2: Um…I’m on my work laptop this morning and everything looks fine. I didn’t do anything. Tiny elves must have fixed it overnight and now I owe them some monumentally huge favor that will be called in at the most inconvenient time. I’m still going to do those updates, though. Probably over the weekend.

It’s early and I have some free time

Zannah — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:24:19 +0000

Sometime last month I installed a widget to track blog stats, and since then I’ve gotten a little obsessive. Which is completely ridiculous, since my highest views-per-day count is only 49, and that was unusual. This is not a high-traffic site. But I like to watch the search terms that bring people here, and in the last week or so, quite a large number of people (comparatively speaking) have been coming here from a search for “bernese mountain dog puppies”. One time (ONE TIME!) I posted a picture of some adorable puppies that happened to be Bernese Mountain Dogs (because, let’s face it, they are the cutest puppies), and now all these people hoping for a Bernese Mountain Dog site are disappointed. Sorry, people. But they came! Maybe some will stay.

This morning’s class is supposed to start at 8:30. It’s 8:18, and I haven’t seen a single person. Usually there’s at least one person who comes early. Besides me. I have to be early.

Whoops. I was just plunged into darkness. The lights in this room are motion-sensitive, and I guess one person typing in the back of the room doesn’t create enough motion to keep them on.

Hey! There’s my one early person. Time to stop playing.

Roaming the Internet when I should be outside

Zannah — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 19:22:36 +0000

Thanks to this post at Three Word Chant! (punctuation theirs), I think I’ve found my new favorite place to go for a chuckle. Check this one out.

I found that link because I’m in the middle of organizing my bookmarks. Again. (And that means I have to go to every single bookmarked site to see if I want to keep it.) When I organized them last time, I put all the blogs I read in one folder, in alphabetical order. When I have free time, I go through the list in order. But I’ve had so little free time lately that I haven’t been getting far down the list, and I’ve inadvertently been missing some of the sites I used to read daily just because their names start with letters in the second half of the alphabet. Then I feel bad for neglecting them because that reminds me of always being stuck at the back of the line (for lunch, for assemblies, for field trips) in the elementary school because my last name started with an S. Now my last name starts with a B, but that hardly matters ’cause no one asks us to line up in alphabetical order anymore. Anyway, I’m over that, but I don’t want to treat my favorite blogs the same way. So now, my favorites are in a Daily Blog folder, separate from the rest. Yes, I play favorites. And I need to update my blogroll, but that will have to happen on a day that’s not so beautiful. Because why am I inside? It’s gorgeous out there!

I have to shower (ran six miles this morning – go me!) and then go to the library. I need books on CD for my super-long commute (now that I’m not carpooling anymore).

Also, I am totally losing my mind. There was something else I planned to write about, but I have NO idea what it was.

Censoring myself

Zannah — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 02:13:24 +0000

I discarded a post that went into detail about the annoying verbal habits of a coworker of mine. SO annoying. But that’s the sort of thing that can get me in trouble, work-wise, and I decided not to post it. I’m applying the lessons I learned from Dooce. Who was in town yesterday, incidentally, because she was invited to participate in a forum on workplace flexibility at the White House. She planned an informal get-together last night, and much as I would have loved to be there to meet all these people I’ve been chatting with, the timing didn’t work out for me. Sad.

You know, it’s hard to avoid writing about work sometimes. I just deleted a couple of sentences about John’s work situation.

Well, since I can’t manage to think about much else, I’m going to quit. We watched an episode of Castle tonight, but it took nearly two hours to get through it. We took turns pausing it to vent about the day. We do feel better, though, and we were able to finish the episode. (Oh no for Beckett!) I love that show.

Now with more inanity!

Zannah — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:34:00 +0000

Some days I wish something interesting would happen to me so I could write about it. Most of the time I’m just as glad nothing did. I don’t need excitement. I just need to know I can come home every day. (That sounds so sad. I need a lot of other things, too, but we’re not talking about that right now. Read into that what you will.)

Jess (pyromaniac in disguise) wrote some good stuff today. (“Wrote some good stuff.” I have a way with words.)

If you know your classic paintings, you may enjoy this video. You’ll probably enjoy it even if you don’t know that many, if I may use myself as an example. I found it courtesy of this post from The Bloggess. There’s a lot of other good stuff in that post, too.

I’m happy to provide links to interesting things, but I can’t let that be all I do. That would be boring for me. Of course, right now I am boring to me. Mm. Boring is no good. Smoothies are good. (As are non sequiturs.)

Thank the whatever from high atop the thing for autosave! My computer crashed (for the second time tonight) and I was convinced I’d lost this post. But no, WordPress has an autosave function, and I don’t have to start over. Which is good, since I don’t have the energy to redo even this less-than-stellar entry.

And with that, I think I’ll hurry up and post this before I crash again. But what caused the crash(es)? Hard drive? Windows installation? Wish I knew. Too bad I’m not married to a computer fixer-upper/programmer/family tech-support guru. Which reminds me…this is very funny. ‘Cause it’s true.

Morning person?

Zannah — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:40:08 +0000

Much as I like sleeping in and being lazy in the mornings, I find that I’m happier when I’m up and moving and it’s early (not crazy early). As the day goes on, no matter how good that day is, I get more and more tired and worn out and less likely to want to do anything. That’s mostly why I need to run in the mornings. If I put it off to after work, I might never get out the door. Actually, I’m gonna have to change that soon. I’ll have to get downtown so early that I won’t be able to run in the mornings.

My point, if I had one, was that I like mornings. Particularly sunny ones. Oh, right, my other point is that I think I might like to become a morning blogger. Not sure if that’ll happen, considering how long it’s been taking me to get ready for work lately, but maybe then I wouldn’t feel this pressure to come up with something in the evenings when I’m brain-dead. What’s that you say? I’m always brain-dead? Don’t be mean.

Moving toward a decision

Zannah — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:30:39 +0000

Two things:

The band is practicing tonight, so I spent about 20 minutes picking up downstairs. The island is totally clear, the kitchen counters are mostly clear, I only left John’s stuff on the dining room table (laptop, camera, PSP), and I mostly cleared off the things that were sitting on the steps waiting to go upstairs. The house looks nicer, and I feel A TON better.
We bought the dining room table! We went out this afternoon and just bought it. Table and six chairs. We got the 10% discount for the holiday weekend and we convinced them to give us free delivery since that was last weekend’s deal and we TOTALLY would have bought last weekend except for the snow. Not our fault.
Okay, three things. You may have noticed that I switched the site back to the original template. This isn’t necessarily permanent. I just don’t know which one is my favorite. And I may switch between a couple templates regularly. We’ll see. Anyway, I’m going to post screen shots of each version. You tell me if you had a favorite or if there were things you liked about some of them that I can incorporate into another one. I NEED INPUT, PEOPLE.

#1 – I liked this one, but if I go with it, I’ll probably mess with the colors. If I’m going to use a fading color theme, I’ll do it with something not boring. Maybe shades of green.

#2 – This one is a little too big, I think. Reminds me (and Dad, I think) of a newspaper. I did like the width of the columns, though. I like how it takes up the whole page.

#3 – I think we all agreed to not like this one.

#4 – This one is, well, it’s very much like my original template, but blue instead of red. Maybe I’ll switch to this one when my mood is blue….

#5 – Here we have the same TOO BIG problem. Too stark, too, I think. But again, maybe if I messed with the color, this would be better.

#6 – I like this one a lot. The banner picture across the top makes it SO different from the others. Do I like it more than the simpler templates? I don’t know. Do you?