Seismic Twitch

I have a new laptop computer. Right now I’m doing the customizing to Firefox that I want. I’ve already done most of the updates, though I guess I should do the windows updates too. I’ll do them while I’m doing the Firefox stuff.

It’s going to take some time to get used to this wee beastie. I have a teeny little mouse that has retractable wires, perfect for transporting. It doesn’t work quite as well as a regular mouse, but it works and it’s cute.

That’s it for now.

Ta-Ra

I don’t know why, but right now I’ve dipped into a hole of depression that is being difficult to crawl out of. I’m angry and sad at alternating times and sometimes together. There’s not a whole lot more to me right now.

Go to The Breast Cancer Site and press all the buttons for child hunger, child health, book distribution, savig the rainforest and feeding animals in shelters. Buy the merchandise from the sites. Much of the merchandise is fair trade. This means that the maker, frequently someone in a home industry, is given a fair price for their goods. There are lots of good ideas for those people who are hard to buy for, like mothers who have everything. I bet they don’t have something on the site that they would love. It supports good causes.

There. I’ve done a good deed to day. Now I’m going to shower and get ready for Dad’s visit.

Ok. So it’s not tool time. But I did do somet things today. Let’s see. I panted my bulletin board. Alas, my experiment of painting the frame without sanding it first failed. The paint peeled off. So tomorrow I’ll be taping paper down on the cork part, scraping off the yellow paint and sanding, then repainting the frame. With luck, the whole thing will be done by tomorrow evening. Then I’ll hang it to allow the paint to finish curing and then use it. It was a valuable lesson though. Now I know that I have to sand the long shelf before I spray it to make sure the paint has something to stick to.

I had one heck of a sleep last night. I took off the blue throw and the small matress cover I was using as a foot cover and put the duvet on. That worked beautifully. I was just the right temperature throughout the night, through the morning and up to 2 pm. That’s when I got up. I think I overslept though. I’m feeling somewhat groggy.

My desk is a mess. I’m looking forward to having all the painting done and getting my selves up to where they’re going to be. Then I’ll put the stuff that’s supposed to go on them, on them and that should tidy off my desk quite nicely. I also will be taking the tree lights off my ceiling and putting colour bulbs on and restringing them around my room. That’s going to add a nice splotch of colour. They’ll be plugged into my power thingie so they’ll have a plug that I can turn on and off when I want the lights. Right now their set up to come on whenever I turn on the overhead light. Since I’ve started using a lamp and reflected light off the ceiling I don’t use the overhead. That means they’re off.

Did that make sense?

I think I need more colours.

My hand is officially sore. So I’m going to stop here. I don’t think that my hand likes using spray paint.

Ta-Ra

It’s in. I got 83% in the Aboriginal People and Justice in Canada sociology class. That means my average in my major is 82.5%, 12.5% higher than the minimum. I’m rather pleased.

I’m skeert! My student loans form came…and there’s no errors. This means that I can go to the university this afternoon and do all the processing there. Then it’ll get sent back for processing at the loans centre and the money will be deposited in 6-10 days.

I don’t know what to think. There are no errors. There were no delays. I’m not used to efficiency. There’s got to be another shoe to drop.

In the meantime I’m going to eat a grapefruit and orange. Sometimes it’s just the thing a girl has to do.

As can be customary with the new moon, i’m beginning some new projects. First off, today I was awake at 8 am. Bran made me some lovely toast and tomato for breakfast. Later, I made some coffee. While Bran went about setting up the bed frame for the bed upstairs, I looked around to see what I could do in my room.

Without the insert for the drill, I couldn’t take the shelves down. I need the torque it has. I also need it’s ability to actually unscrew the brackets from the walls. My hand simply isn’t up to doing that. Instead I moved my bulletin board to a new location in readiness to move the shelves. I also decided to spray paint the shelves and the board. So, with that in mind I papered the bulletin board. I have it papered on the diagonal, and then I papered over the whole of it so that I can do the frame tomorrow, should it not rain, like is predicted. It looks like Friday will be a good day for that. I’m also going to put in the triple moon that I have in one of my binders to help with the project. It’s going to look very nice.

I’m going to cut out star and moon shapes for my shelves. I figure that if I can see the bottom of them, I can paint them pretty too. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. The brackets will be sprayed separately so that they’re different colours from the rest. Then when I’m done them, I’ll do the rest of the shelves. I’m quite looking forward to how it’s going to look. I have lots of colours to choose from, yello, orange, red, dark green and black. Though I’m thinking that it might be nice to wait a bit and see what other colours I can get. We’ll see. Bran did find the necessary insert and screw driver tip that I need, so all I have to do is figure out how to operate the drill with two hands and hold the shelf up while I’m taking it down. Anyone got some spare hands I could use?

I was online tonight playing Grafitti on yahoo. That game is a hoot! It’s so much fun trying to draw with a mouse, and some of the words are incredibly difficult to think of drawings of. I mean, how does one draw “Atari”, or “motorcade”.

Oh, miracle of miracles. I made my bed today. I mean it. Really. It’s all quite tidy right now. It think that I should see what I can do about finding material to make a duvet cover, though. White isn’t all that good a colour to have on my bed, what with Boy bounding on it periodically (and only he knows where he’s been).

Once I get my room all set up I can concentrate on doing the crafts that I’ve put off. I don’t want to be working on something only to be partway done and have to put it aside and lose it, or break it, when I’m shifting stuff about.

Bran found my flower seeds. So I’ll be putting nasturtiums in the little garden up front as well as some “old fashioned garden” seeds to fill out where the violets, columbine and other perennials aren’t at yet. They’ll fill the space eventually, but for now they’re awfully little. I want a riot of colour. The nice thing about nasturtiums is that they’re totally edible. They have a lovely peppery flavour and tang that’s similar to a radish, except that it’s the flower or leaves. They make marvelous additions to summer salads. Since I don’t use pesticides on anything they’re even organic.

The game has made my hand sore so I’m going to stop here. In the nonce, have a fun sleep…or a fun day, depending on where in the world you are.

Ta-Ra

Ladyfriend brought the rest of her stuff over. Well, not the rest of her stuff, but the big things. Furniture is being shifted about and moved to accomodate the new additions to the household. I’m sure the plants will be happier with the arrangments as they are right now. I discovered that I have to make clippings of my goldfish plant, enough for both me and Ladyfriend, then I’ll toss the parent plant. The whole thing is tatty looking and needs to be repotted, so creating new plants from the vines will be much nicer.

Boy now has my old dresser and his “dresser” is now serving it’s purpose in the dining room. Three of the four shelves are holding the blender, mix master and food processor. I’m sure there’s more that can go in there. The drawers will be filled with other stuff. The dining room may not have a table, but it’s tidier now than it’s been in a while.

I shall be gettting a set of drawers, maybe wood, maybe plastic, to hold the remaining remnants of my clothing. My summer shorts and long sleeved shirts need a new home.

Bryer’s Ice Cream. Why do I mention that, capitalized as well? Because that company makes a Fudgesicle chocolate ice cream to die for. Oddly enough I don’t like many chocolate ice creams because they frequently have a powdery taste that is undesireable. This stuff doesn’t and it’s a joy to eat. So if you see a dark blue Bryer’s ice cream container and it has the Fudgesicle logo on it, and if you like chocolate, I recommend that you buy this stuff. It’s way good.

Ok, I’ve stressed my poor hand enough today with helping get Ladyfriend’s things in the house and helping some to rearrange things. I didn’t do a huge amount, but I like to think that I helped. My incision is all red with being irritated, so I’m going to smear on some Bactroban and stop typing. Besides, I still have a grapefruit and orange to peel. I have to conserve my hand’s energy.

Ta-Ra

I’ve replaced the comments that Blogspot provides with Haloscan comments. I tried using their automatic template changer, but it wouldn’t work for some reason. So I went in and removed coding (that I hope isn’t going to screw things up terribly) with the coding from Haloscan.

I’m sorry to lose the comments that have been made on previous entries, and I’m also sorry to lose the typing verification thing. I have to get a membership with Haloscan to enable that particular feature. It’s not expensive, but I don’t have even that right now.

Now I can monitor all comments left on my blog. I can see the comments on the Haloscan site even if the comment was made on an archived entry. I couldn’t with Blogspot’s comments. I hate missing anyone’s comments. They’re all important, well, most of them are. A few that have been left, in the past, were less than stellar, but that’s neither here nor there.

I’ve been listening to books on the computer. Right now I’m listening to The House of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I’m rather glad I found that. Sadly, they have them separated into chapters or parts. I can’t have the entire book play. It’s pleasant though. I’ve already listened to The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Anderson and Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Coleridge. I’ll probably give the latter another listen to get more of the meaning behind the reading. Perhaps I’ll even read it while it is being read to me.

That’s about it. When this chapter of the book is done I’m going to go to bed.

Ta-Ra

Today, while I was still asleep, Boy crept into my room and then crept out again. I knew it was him but didn’t bother to stir. I was still needing more sleep.

Bran came in and woke me a little bit later and showed me why Boy came in. He had made a dragonfly garden paving stone for me for Mother’s Day. It’s really quite beautiful. The body is of irridescent glass that shifts colours as the light moves on the pieces.

When I’m able to, I’ll put a picture of it here. Hell, I might even use it as my avatar.

He’s really growing up to be a wonderful person. I love him all to itty bitty bits.

I just realized that. Heh. I kind of like not knowing what day it is.

I got up sometime around 10 am. Bran, Boy and Boy’s friend were out delivering the flyers. Ladyfriend was upstairs studying. I decided to spend the day upstairs, so that’s what I did. I watched The Big Sleep again and Fell asleep during Casablanca. Bran came home and we watched some TV, then he and Ladyfriend went off to her former apartment to pick stuff up to move here.

I saw several cool shows today. One of them called Worst Jobs In History, is hosted by the man who played the peon in the Blackadder series from BBC. He gets to try out the worst jobs in history. He has tried his hand at tanning leather, processing linen using fermented urine, making purple cloth with the rotted and fermented corpses of a kind of mollusk and more. Today there was the purple cloth making. He was also the whipping boy. That was a noble boy who was the proxy for a crown prince for punishment. Whenever the prince did something naughty, the whipping boy was the one who took the lashings. Another was food taster. One might think that the job wouldn’t be so bad, however, it wasn’t so much the job itself that was the problem, but the fear that surrounded the job.

Then there was the lance maker, the man who made the lances for the tilting tournaments (jousting). The lances had to be made to break so as not to cause injury, especially to a king. Aparently King Henry VIII was an avid tilter. The lances were the paper nose tissue equivalent of the age. He was also a washer woman. This meant making his own lye solution from leechings of ashes, then beating the crap out of the linens and such. They dried the linens on privet hedges. If there was a wind and the sheets blew into the mud, then the washing had to happen all over again.

The most interesting thing is, that many of the “worst” jobs invovled either heavy labour (of course) and frequently, stench. The poor man gagged at the smell of the fermented mullosks, nearly lost it when he was stomping on linens when they were being processed in fermented urine, and did lose it in the tanning barn.

The interesting thing is that two of the jobs had been lost to history. Because the production of lances was very much something of its time and the product was a throw away, the art of creating lances that break without harming the tilters was lost to time. It took a master carpenter a couple of weeks to figure out how to do it properly. So that art was brought back. Also, the job of the “Purple Maker.” According to the site that was the worst job of the Royal Court. It was so neat to see it and makes me very glad there’s no such thing as smellovision. The fermented mullusks were stewed with water and lye from ash leechings. This was left to stew for about 10 days, covered. Then the cloth was added to the brew and covered again. It was left to sit for some time and then the cloth was removed. Exposure to the air made the cloth change from whitish grey to blue and then to purple. You could see the change happen.

Then it was on to watching the surgical removal of a 160 pound tumor that a Romanian woman had. The tumour had been growing for 4 years and she was approaching death. The tumor took so much of her blood supply that her organs were beginning to fail from both lack of oxygen and lack of nutrients. It was quite a scary thing to watch. She survived the removal, the blood loss, risk of infection from the open wound that was left, skin grafts and six months later was living a normal life. She was still quite thin, but I think she was normally that petit. Had she not had the surgery she certainly would have died. A Dr. McKinnon from Chicago had done a similar surgery for a woman in the USA and he and his team of anesthetists and nurses and a shit pile of supplies went to Romania to remove the tumor. He and a Romanian doctor did the surgery in record time with minimal blood loss.

I also watched God or the Girl. Yeah, I know, but the old Catholic child in me insisted. Of course the pagan in me wanted them all to marry. It turns out, that of the four men featured in the show, only one chose to become a priest. I had predicted him. One, I’m not sure is going to remain Catholic. He’s a bit on the charismatic type. I can see him on the pulpit of a fire and brimstone Baptist church. One of them chose early. He chose “the girl.” I was freaked when I saw his parish priest’s response. It was like watching a bad boyfriend/girlfriend breakup. However, this guy likes being a teacher and if that’s where his passion is, then that’s where he should be. The other wasn’t surprising. I wouldn’t have predicted him to be a priest. I think the push to him considering becoming a clergyman wasn’t his own, but pressure from his parents. You know it’s pressure when they don’t ask how he is, they ask how far he is from his decision to become a priest. They pretended to be ok, but I’m pretty sure that they were disappointed. He was the last son and that was their last chance at having a priest in the family.

Then I came downstairs. So I was upstairs for a whole 12 hours. I didn’t even come down to peek at email. Now, my hand is sore again, well, not the hand, but my wrist joint. That means that I should be taking some anti-inflammitory and stop typing. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Ta-Ra