New Zealand, here we come!

It's official: we are going to have a vacation longer than 3 days! Naturally, since we never even took a honeymoon, we are pretty excited. However, it occurred to me that some of you may not be able to recognize us when we return from our adventures, jetlagged, sunburnt (hole in ozone down there, remember?) wrinkled and worn.

So, here is a pre-vacation picture:

To make it easier to keep you all updated, I'm going to use this blog as my trip diary, including pictures.  Far cry from when we each used to carry spiral bound notebooks to journal our trips, and glue sticks to paste in postcards along the way, right? 

And, of course, my trip Karma is in good shape, even though it has been several years since the last travel:

1) Within days of when the first flight reservations were made, Christchurch had a 7+ magnitude earthquake, the worst in 88 years.  Most of the downtown beautiful old buildings fell down, and it will be years before all the infrastructure is repaired, BUT, only 3 people died. 

2) A couple weeks later, what the weather channel called the largest storm on the planet swept across the Tasman Sea and took out the entire west coast of New Zealand.  There were blizzards and deep snows and thousands of frozen lambs in the southern alps (it's spring there), and 4" of wet snow, trees down, power outages and chaos in the sub-tropical north.  Although, I did look at those pix from near Auckland the next day and it didn't look like more than a normal, maybe even good, winter day in Michigan.  But with palm trees.

3) As we were planning itinerary dates and modes of transport, we opted to use one of NZ's intercity bus companies...immediately after which decision, we discovered that one had crashed into a tree earlier this year. 

4) And only a few days ago, the domestic airline we will be using had yet another successful (everyone walked away from it) emergency landing (the pilots are evidently getting pretty good at these after several) because the nose gear keep falling off -- or something.

Now, I hasten to remind all of you that this Karma thing never happens to me during the trip.  It only frightens family members before I go anywhere.  Like that time we spent several weeks touring by train and bus through Mexico and Central America, and right before we left there was all this hoohaw about drug cartel killings and the US closed the boarder for a couple days.  Of course, we simply walked across at Calexico to the Mexicali train depot, with all the other pedestrian commuters...through a tunnel that didn't even have a guard posted to check ID. 

Never saw any of the purported guerilla warfare in Chiapas or Guatemala, either.  Did have the bus stopped once or twice during Easter week travel to check when crossing country boarders, but nobody ever asked us much.  I guess we didn't look dangerous, and we certainly didn't look like rich gringos by that time!

Okay.  Will endeavor to update this blog regularly.  I'm taking my computer with me, and the digital camera, and our hotels promise internet access.  Yeah, I know, but we'll see. 

Oh, for Heaven's Sake!

Under the heading of people who clearly have too much time on their hands...but isn't it cute, anyway?

Baby watermelons...not!

I mean, what's not to love?

But I'M not gonna make them!

Stash getting out of hand?

Want/need some of that new yarn (fabric, patterns, rubber stamps, paints, clay) but can’t fit any more in until you use up what’s already there?

Are friends and family beginning to worry that you need an intervention?

Well, hey, pack up the extras and come on over to an end of summer stash party. Donate, trade, buy, sell – as you wish. Leftovers go home with you, or can be dropped in a charity box (to be consulted upon, but might be the PTO Thrift Shop, alternative high school, women’s shelter…?)

1-3pm Saturday, August 29

6751 Scio Church Road, A2 (1.2 miles west of Zeeb, on the left. We’re in the ‘granny’ apartment around back.)

Light refreshments, good company, lovely weather, Crafters’ time! (sorry, but this tiny house isn’t safe for very small children)

Oh, and drive in very carefully, as there are multiple small children, goats, dogs, cats, turkeys and chickens wandering the yard and driveways, LOL.

Waiting for the Teapot

What are teapots, you say? And why would one want to watch for them?


Well, that is an understandable question, seeing how young you are :) But honest, computers did not always multi-task, or work in background mode, or process as quickly as new games machines do today. And the screensaver would come on many times while you waited, unable to do anything else.

So many happy hours have I spent, in the 'Good Ol' Days,' while waiting for DOS engines to complete whatever task I had asked some piece of software to do...

See: I'm old. Way old in computer terms, since I began with Timex Sinclair that had a whopping 2k of memory and attached to my black and white TV... Worked my way up through Tandy 2000 to DOS 2.

Then I switched to Macs when we went overseas. Then back to DOS (5 by this time) when we returned. Made a semi-disastrous move to DOS 6, then Windows 3, 3.1, 3.11. (I skipped Windows 95 entirely, although some clients did use it, badly.) Other computers in the family ran 98, NT, 2000, me (by which you can see that games were never the reason or function for the computers, LOL.)

Once I did some OCR scanning of county documents (100s of pages) that took roughly a minute and a half per page to scan and 5 more minutes to run character recognition and save as text in Windows 3.11 -- which left me to spend hours every day for a week watching Microsoft's 3D pipes screensaver....

I saw lots of teapots then. It was cool!

I loved my pipes. They were beautiful, they were fascinating and relaxing, and helped deal with the very natural inclination to hurl the computer out the window.

These were PCs, remember, not MACs. MACs did not get mistreated, because they rarely abused their users. That may change, now that Apple has started incorporating PC stuff. :(

Believe me, Pipes was the ONLY thing I regretted about moving back to MACs several years ago!

And now? Now, thanks to my brother the computer guru, I have a PC specifically designed to run Second Life (because my current MAC is still running OS 9 and OS X.2.8 since I refuse to upgrade to an Mac/PC mule)...

This generic box runs fast, has AMD instead of Intel chips inside, does NOT have the neon lights and chrome typical of 'games' machines, and uses Windows XP (because, he says, Vista is too new to have the bugs worked out enough to run games well).

AND IT HAS PIPES!!! Oh, the joy, the joy!

Of course, it rarely ever takes long enough doing something for the pipes to come on, unless I'm watching a video on YouTube, or reading some long blog post... Sigh.

And now I have heard that it might not even HAVE the teapots any longer!

What insanity is this? Some stupid notion that, for security reasons, all the little undocumented code (referred to as Easter eggs) had to be removed. Snort. Like software manufacturers are going to take out all their back doors!

Not very likely, even if we could tell -- but they probably have removed our little harmless, entertaining teapots!

Rats!

But no; wait. There are rumors that the teapots may still be there in Windows XP. Nobody who reports this on the Web has actually seen one themselves, of course.

But hope doth spring eternal....

Okay, If You're Tired of Knitting....

...there are other things to do with yarn, LOL.

Today's edition of the Skull a Day Blog, for instance... And every one of the creations, about one every day, is different! Take the tour and see for yourselves

Sigh. When do these people get any chores done? Surely that much creativity must take up the whole day!

Hey, this excuse works for me!

moar funny pictures

Okay.

Want.

Sigh.

Make a Snowflake...

This is SO cool! (smile) Paper cutting for the 'Net...

Thanks to Nancy for pointing us to it...



Click on the icon, takes you to the site. Click on create a snowflake and play. Or click on the little white dots falling gently to see what others have created.

Allow for the possibility that you won't get the chores done immediately this morning.......

One of my fav blogs....LOLCats

moar funny pictures

Thoughts on Second Life...

Well, of course, those of us who have passed the climacteric are already in our third life -- 1)childhood, 2) childrearing, 3) maturity (er, hopefully)...

I finally went to see what all the talk was about Second Life, which is a multiuser online game setting that has 30,000 folks and more playing at any one time.

[For those of you unfamiliar with multiuser, real time gaming: Second Life provides a venue driven and designed by the participants, for the purpose of living out their fantasies -- to one extent or another. That can seem to some of us like a chance to get a bit out of hand, perhaps, but it's probably a lot safer than acting out in Real Life, LOL. What is particularly exciting about this kind of game is that thousands of people can interact in many ways that would not be available to them in RL. To see a video presentation go to this page, and click on 'video'...]

Friends, relatives and online correspondents have been chatting up SL for a long time. (3 years in the computer world being practically an eon) I went and took a look at the beta release several years back, but opted out largely because it cost a monthly fee in the beginning. Now, of course, my MAC is too old to run it; but one of our younger PCs will play. And, it is now FREE for basic playing.

One of the attractions for people who have talked to me is the freedom to wander about and strike up conversations with anyone who looks interesting. (By moving the cursor over their avatar, personal profile info is available, such as screen name, age, interests, etc.)

Many people do not feel safe, for whatever reasons, to just wander into a crowd in real life and just start talking. Particularly if the person they are considering talking to happens to be dressed as a giant purple-striped white tiger! Or a Goth queen. Or a tatoo-covered giant in black leather and chains. Or even a gauzy green fairy, complete with wand that shoots sparkles...

Or simpler, yet -- how many would be willing to stroll about in a strange neighborhood or landscape, just looking at the view? Or walk into someone else's house, garden or shop, just to see how it was designed. (In Second Life, if the owner/creator didn't want you to, it would be private and you wouldn't be able to, as I understand it.)

No, it appears to me that SL has indeed taken on a life of its own, growing hourly as business, politicians, religions and educational institutions begin to set up shop. (Linden Labs, the source, presently has 30,000 servers, and still experiences periods when too many users want to be there and it slows things down or crashes altogether.)

What is the point of all that computer power?

Say you had always wanted to be a pointy eared waif of a female, who could dress in veils and maybe even have wings? Design your avatar and think up a name and away you go.

Always wanted to open a coffee shop where poets could hang out, maybe have jazz concerts on a few nights a week? Design it and they will come: the customers, the poets, the musicians...

Real life musicians, poets, and speakers of all kinds (as well as wannabes who are practicing their skills) are visiting and/or setting up shop in SL. Real money is changing hands, here, in such large amounts that it boggles the mind (millions of US dollars a day). Politicians will no doubt frequent the place, as the election draws nearer, and there has already been one debate, at least.

However, while I can see the potential attractions, especially for trying out new behaviors, learning new things, interacting with lots of new people who might live across the planet -- and, of course, the potential for negative stuff, as well, is no different from any other medium --

For me, Second Life just doesn't click. Yet. I have been trying to figure out why for a couple days, and this is what I think so far:

Firstly, maybe I don't need a second life for socializing. I mean, I already wander about and talk to anyone who looks interesting, LOL. It never occurs to me that I shouldn't stop to admire someone's lovely garden, or interesting house. Or beautifully tricked out old Dream Machine (motorcycle) in the mall parking lot! Or even the puppy who is walking his person through my neighborhood.

Perhaps I'm not exactly in the norm...? I don't know, except that I do remember seriously embarrassing my teenage children (you know who you were) in several past episodes...

Like that time outside a restaurant where two great big gorgeous red motorcycles were parked in shining fingerprintless perfection. One of them had a yellow rubber ducky stuck in the chrome spokes of its front wheel. Well, you know I hung about and asked the middle-aged biker dude what that was about!

The other problem I have with the game is that its graphics, however superb and steadily improving they are, still aren't as detailed as real life. I end up feeling sensory deprived. Not only are the incredibly complex levels of natural substance missing, but the density of information is only about 1-2% what it would be standing on the beach in RL.

Here's a screen shot Uploaded to Flickr! on November 17, 2007, by Andromega:It is stunningly beautiful, one of the best I've seen, but not yet the norm.

And here's another outstanding one, Uploaded to Flickr! on November 20, 2007, by Wildstar Beaumont

But here is real life -- a gate to the Matthaei Botanic Garden on a sunny, summer day:

Or, how about this Christmas amaryllis, smiling on all comers?

Apparently, I use a lot of different senses to collect information about the world around me, especially when having a conversation. The SL avatars have improved tremendously, but they still can't show the level of emotion and non-verbal cues that make me feel comfortable.

So, I guess my heart isn't broken that my old (4 years) MAC doesn't handle the game. By the time I upgrade, I bet Second Life will be even more mind boggling in its growth, in its technology, and in its community.


Meanwhile, it is rainy day, 20 degrees warmer than yesterday, full of fresh scents and cool mists and the last of the leaves falling off the trees and painting the lawns and streets in yellows and reds and oranges and four kinds of rusty browns...

I'm gonna go for a walk around the neighborhood and talk to people who are out doing the same thing, or else raking leaves on their tree lawns!

We Had Fun with Rubber Stamps...

Last Saturday, went over to a friend's house to make these gift tins full of cute little cards. Cheryl is a Stampin' Up demonstrator (you can see some of her sample projects on her web page) and has several classes, demonstrations and parties each week. We are talking serious about her business, here, but always full of fun and great ideas.

This particular session was on making a decorative tin to hold a series of little sentiment cards: get well, thanks, congrats, etc. In a matter of a couple hours, we ladies made them all.

The ladies ranged in age from capital 'O' to about second grade...
and most of us had played with rubber stamps before, but none of us had ever used Mod Podge or tried to decorate a tin box. Fortunately, Cheryl had made all the color selections for us to choose from, had precut the papers and ribbon
and provided several completed samples for us to use as models.We used a corner rounder punch to make the papers fit the top of the tins, used Mod Podge to glue them down, and to glue ribbon around the edge of the lid and another narrow piece of paper around the bottom edge. Then covered all with another coat of the decopoge stuff that really looks like thick white glue. It dries clear and makes a good sealer to protect the papers.

While the tins were drying, (which they did very quickly) we selected, stamped, colored, and glued together our cardlets with which to fill the tins. This actually took me much longer than assembling the tin, as I had to choose which colors and which stamps I wanted, as well as what colors I wanted to paint them (We used watercolor pens). Decisions always bog me down!

And voila!
I think I will make a few more to fill with other things...

Maybe this knitting stuff is getting out of hand...?

I mean: I'm just wondering, here...
One of these nifty little cozies to prevent your snack from getting bruises in your pocket or back pack was $12.00. Then the NY Times ran an article and the demand jumped so much, she's raised her prices to $18.50.

Each. (Does not come with the apple.)

Yeah. I missed out on the pet rock, too.

Ooo-ooo, I've been tagged! (Thanks, Marvin)

Things You May or May Not Know About Me

A) Jobs I have had in my life:

1. Caring for a neighbor's chickens
2. Fast food sous-chef in a chicken place
3. Proctor for college exams
4. Office manager for architect
5. Psych services counselor in the California prison system
   
6. Counselor, adult learning skills, college level
7. Assorted temp office
   
8. Office manager, landscape architects

B) Movies I would watch over and over:

1. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
2. Joseph
3. Sahara
4. Evolution
5. Down Periscope
6. Riverdance

C) Places I have lived:

1. California
2. Solomon Islands
3. New Mexico
4. Michigan

D) TV Shows that I watch:

1. None. We turned it off in April 2007. Haven't missed it.
2. News comes from NPR and 6 newspapers in 3 languages, online.

E) Some places I have been:

1. Most of the USA
2. Some of Canada
3. Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua
4. Airport stopovers in Hawaii, Figi, Paris, NY and Belize don't count
5. Israel

F) People who e-mail me (regularly):

1. Spammers warning me that my bank/eBay/PayPal account is closing unless I instantly tell them all my personal information.
2. Spammers selling me fake watches, mortgages and pharma.
   
3. Spammers offering enhancements of sexual organs I do not possess.
4. Spammers talking about who knows what, because it is in Chinese. (Chinese? Why not Russian or Norwegian??)
   
5. Spammers claiming to be classmates sending me an eCard. I remember my classmates, and they wouldn't be sending me anonymous eCards. Of course, seeing as I have made absolutely no effort to keep in touch with any of them over the years, it is possible that they no longer remember either my name or their own...we are all of us OLD, don't you know?
6. Overstock.com, whose unsubscribe button does not work and neither do emails. I will never, ever go to that site again. I never bid or bought anything!
   
7. eBay, but I asked for those notices. Hoping I'll strike it rich one of these days...
   
8. A handful of dear friends, and occasionally, one of the children.
   

G) Four of my favorite foods:

1. Fresh fruit
2. Home made pies
3. Home made soups
4. Fresh bread (bakery or home made)
5. Tomatoes hot off the vine in my garden

H) Places I would rather be right now:

1. None. It's summer. I love Spring, Summer and Fall in Ann Arbor.
2. In winter: just about anywhere south of here that might have sunshine!
3. There's been talk of retiring to somewhere else...but specifics aren't in evidence. New Zealand has been mentioned, also Solomon Islands (out towards Gizo), Hawaii and Saba (Netherlands Antilles). None are likely to happen anytime soon, because of all those boxes of papers that must be culled before leaving, LOL. Besides which, I notice they are all islands, and what with global warming melting the ice caps and raising ocean levels...I might have to learn to tread water! DH points out that those are also mostly volcanic islands....
   

I) Things I am looking forward to this year:

1. Having space to spread out my stuff for the first time in 12 years of marriage. No more camping out of boxes!
2. Having more time to work on my newsletter, blog and other writing projects, including two YA novels.
   
3. Pulling out my knitting machines, and relearning after 12 years in storage -- or not. Could be, I'll just sell them on eBay.
   
4. Getting back in shape and losing some fat I put on after moving to Midwest. Doing winter for the first time in 50 years, combined with menopause, appears to be a very broadening experience...
   

Great ways to waste time on YouTube...

Don't be afraid, now. This is good stuff, not scary, but maybe not safe for work, only because you need the sound, and everybody in the office will be over wondering what's so cool in your cube.....

The arts are fully represented on YouTube -- even some arts with which you might not be familiar:

Nora, the piano playing cat. She even does duets, so you should visit her web page, too. We aren't talking stomping on the keys, here. Nora really plays, and she has good position/posture, too, LOL. Her sequel is even better.

Dance, anyone? How about dance with props -- er, tools? -- well, it is dance, in typical YouTube off the wall fashion.

Step dancers (but not Irish). Watch the chairs carefully...

A video of what happens when you go on eBay at 2 in the morning because your hot flashes woke you up just enough that you weren't fully awake, but you couldn't get back to sleep...(Not that I would have personal experience with this) set to Weird Al's "eBay" parody.

Another video to Weird Al's "eBay" this done by a couple kids whose native language may not be English, but they are just too funny! This sort of fun with the 'arts' is what YouTube does very well...

A beatbox flautist...

This guy, another beatboxer, at the French national championships. Who knew this rap specialty had international competitions??

A sociology study turned into a music video: Free hugs.

And a Murat, who changes forever your stereotype of a mime.

Now, I'm not sure whether you consider the library, and reference librarians, to be part of the arts...but Ms Dewey most certainly in not your ordinary computer reference...

And to close, from our fav blog of LOLcatz

Speaking of Where I've Been in My Life.....

It's fun to see where I've been in the US, and where I have left to go (although, I'm not real enthusiastic about New York City):


create your own visited states map

Why Wasn't Science Class Like This?

Remember colloid suspensions way back in chemistry class? (Relax; this is a rhetorical question, Dear Ones.)

Well, I do, and being a cook, I already know that cornstarch is seriously weird stuff...but these guys carry it way farther. And some others folks have discovered more ways to fool around in chem lab, as well.

Don't you love YouTube?