Escaping Suburbia

Filed under: Photos on August 17th, 2008 | No Comments »

My very first teddy bear. I think my mom got this by saving points from paper towel purchases or something like that. She did the yarn stitch jobs. I can’t remember if those are his original eyes.

I don’t think I ever named him. He was the best teddy bear for sleeping with, because he smooshed totally flat. Oh yes, I smooshed him.

Filed under: Photos on August 16th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

I think there might be levels of hell cooler than this house was last night. Yeah, I said it gets “a tad warm” in the afternoons. Ha ha ha! I think I finally dragged myself to bed at 3am with an icepack. We lost power in the house sometime yesterday while we were at work… I assume it was a brown out in the area, but don’t really know.

In other news, I joined Facebook this week. What a weird place. You look for people to mark as friends — say you search on a former employer name — and there’s this totally jarring juxtaposition between, like, a CEO that you really respect and two rows down there’s some drunken frat boy fondling his beer bong in his profile photo, then even further on there’s the girl who chose to pose in her underwear and give a wall a lapdance.

There’s just too many social networking places out there, I can’t keep up and I’m just repeating myself everywhere I go. (”Here’s a photo of Papa!”, “Here’s a photo of Papa!”, “Photo album: Papa!”) I have a couple of special-interest forums, Goodreads, Delicious, Facebook, Flickr… and of course not all your friends are in one place. And then there’s this whole thing about collecting friends — a status symbol I guess. I’ve gotten totally random friend requests on Goodreads from complete strangers and I don’t get it.  On Flickr, I understand why you’d mark someone you don’t know as a contact — it’s a way to bookmark their photo stream so you can view it again. I do that all the time and certainly don’t expect reciprocation by any means. But on other sites? In the immortal words of Bobby Hill:

“I don’t know you!!! That’s my purse!!!”

So, Facebook… right. There’s a fun game there, and flair (of which I am going to collect exactly 37 pieces and then stop) and some friends seem to be hanging out there, so… okay. I’ll hang out a while and see what’s the what. But what usually happens is I end up on fifty sites and I visit none of them and then my friends hate me because I’m such a crappy friend and I don’t keep in touch.

And don’t even get me started on the four blogs!  Well, three, really, and then I need to become more courageous to write on the newspaper’s blog.

*pant* *pant* I need a drink.

Now, I have a whole ‘nother rant to go off on about something I read that came out after all the BlogHer drama nonsense, but it’s too freaking hot in here to (a) sit here with my laptop on my lap and (b) get all sweaty thinking about non-drama and weirdo entitlement issues, so whatever, it will have to wait.

Filed under: General on August 15th, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Isn’t that a great name? Dagger Monroe.

That would be the name of the clever, noirish, gumshoe detective in my novel. If I were writing a novel about a clever, noirish, gumshoe detective. Which I’m not. But, if I were!

This combination of words came up on a recent CATCHPA form I had to fill out and they stuck with me. Can’t you just see old Dagger behind his desk, musing over some dame who just sauntered into his life? She’s sure to spell trouble!

Did you know that a lot of those CATCHPA (reCATCHPA) forms are helping to digitize old books? I saw this article recently on NPR and thought that was a pretty cool merging of technology and need, truly capturing those keystrokes and putting them to good use. For a cause like that… Dagger Monroe doesn’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.

(heh)

Filed under: General on August 15th, 2008 | No Comments »

Papa’s not feeling very well lately… he’s getting old. I love this boy so much.

He’s got some fans at the vet’s office too.

Filed under: Photos on August 11th, 2008 | 1 Comment »