I just installed a new anti-spam plugin.

Please e-mail me if you can’t comment.

I’m sitting at the front desk–one of the GAs is out for a funeral–so I’m sitting here waiting for someone to call and ask a question, or come up to the front desk and ask a question.

Also, walking around every 10 minutes and pushing in chairs, because people are SLOBS.

Anything interesting on the Internet today? That is, anything that won’t get me fired when the librarian turns around to see what I’m doing?

ADDENDUM the First:
HA! WIN!

I just got a call from Tanya in Alaska! WHEEEEEE! Talk about the opposite of boring!

Thanks Tanya, you totally made my day!

ADDENDUM the Second:
No more time at the front desk, NOW I’m waiting for scandisk to finish on one computer so I can run disk defragmenter. Woo hoo!

Yes we are.

Conversation 1:
Michelle: How do I look today?
Michael: Monochromatic.

Conversation 2:
Michelle: (looking at gym bag covered in fur and feline footprints.) Someone’s been sleeping on my gym bag.
Michael: Yes, they have.
Michelle: Why were you sleeping on my gym bag?
Michael: (snort) Because it’s so comfortable?

I’ve slacked all week, so I just sat down to do the bills, which includes the $1300 we just put on the credit card for the tickets to Denver (Woo! Woo! [for the trip, not for $1300 on my credit card.])

For the first time in an extremely long time, I actually had a negative balance in Quicken. Of course $900 of that was on two items that are 12 months same as cash, so they aren’t gaining interest, and we’re both getting paid on the 15th, but still. That red $300 was extremely sad to see.

Then I started opening bills, which was of course was even more depressing. Nestled in the middle was the monthly statement for our savings account. I jokingly thought to myself, “Well, maybe there are a couple deposits Michael forgot to enter.”

There were.

To the tune of almost a thousand dollars.

(This is why I don’t let him do the bills. Because it’s a bad thing when I discover several hundred dollars in un-entered credit card slips. [In his defense, it Christmas.])

So in the span of ten minutes I went from being worried about money, to being happy that I had a thousand dollars I didn’t know about. Which really makes no sense because the actual amount of money in those accounts has not changed. I have no more or no less money than I had yesterday (at least until I write out the gas bill.) So why should that discovery make a difference?

But it does. I felt MUCH better than I had, even though the actual numbers meant nothing. (Unless we have a 6 or 12 months same as cash deal, we pay off all credit cards each month, so it’s not like we’re garnering interest or anything.)

Now I just have to wait for August and the economic stimulus package. (Talk about unfair. With 75 and 99 Michael and I are in the LAST group to receive checks. My brother is 01, which means he’ll get one of the first checks written. BAH!)

OK, back to writing bills.

ADDENDUM the First:
And the last thing I opened was a check! Yippee!

The following is an excerpt from the story I’m writing, as requested by Vince, who provided me the name of the news station.

I was just going to give the news excerpt, but decided to publish the entire chapter instead. Maybe this will get me motivated to finish things up. (I just checked, I’m at 52k words right now-103 pages in Word.)

Strangely, the news bit came to me almost fully formed, and was a lot of fun to write.
(more…)

And closing out the season of actually leaving the house and doing things, tonight we saw the Capitol Steps.

All I have to say is it’s really nice to spend an hour and a half laughing.

This geeky.

(more…)

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Time for the local Ramp Festivals!

April 19th is the Richwood Ramp Festival. (The website is painful, but does have some interesting information.)
April 26th is the Randolph County Ramp Festival.

And before you ask, not I’m not going to any Ramp festivals. I’m not THAT nuts.

In case I haven’t mentioned it before, I’m a huge fan of Firefox. It’s my web browser of choice, and I was converted after having used Mozilla for several years. (I also have Sea Monkey, IE 6, and Safari installed on this computer, but I like Firefox best.)

One of the things I’ve grown to adore are the extensions.

All my computers have the L33T KEY extension (convert text to ROT 13 on the fly!), Forecast Fox, IE Tab, Fire FTP, Tab Mix Plus, and Notifiers for Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

But there are some others that are just fun. I just installed Firesomething, and now my browser is called Mozilla Thunderpig. Yesterday it was Firebadger I think. It accomplished nothing other than making me smile when I look at the title bar. I also found the xkcd extension that allows you to read the longer xkcd titles, which, oddly enough, is precisely why I was searching the extensions in the first place.

The aftermath, when it came, was unprecedented.

After years of seeing tweens and young girls tarted up like cheap trollops, the hammer came down with force.

In his state of the state address, the president said that if children wanted to dress like grownups, they’d have to act like grownups; any child found to be wearing adult themed clothing or using adult appliances in public, including mp3 players and phones that did more than make calls and came in colors other than primary, was to immediately be given a job. DVD players were allows as long as they were playing G rated material.

Overnight, sales of Osh Kosh B’Gosh went through the roof, and supply was unable to keep up with demand. Sales of Barbie plummetted as sales of rag dolls and stuffed animals went through the roof.

The only drawback was that rather quickly older teens and college students picked up the new style, and within a year, babydoll outfits, previously limited to a subset of manga and anime fans, were everywhere, which cause teen and twenty-something males no end of panic, as they constinually feared they’d accidentally hit on a thirteen year old instead of an eighteen year old. But even that had it’s bright side, as the scared men and boys became unfailingly polite, since they often couldn’t tell if the females around them were actual children or potential dating material.

(See here for something akin to an explanation.)

I’ve got nothing but busy today. So please share your non-sequiturs.

Additionally, I desperately want to keep writing while I’m tying to get up early enough to work on my other story, so what I really want are phrases our pictures that will set off a story for me. Please?

OK, so I was thinking more along the lines of this or this.

My cousins’ grandmother, with whom I spent a fair a amount of time when I was younger, since I spent a fair amount of time with my aunt & uncle, had trouble breathing today (she’s been in hospice for several months). She’s been aspirated, and is breathing easier, but I believe we are looking at the final path she is going to take to the end.

Please send thoughts of whatever flavor her way, and for her husband and for my uncle and cousins. They are quite religious, but I’m sure are open to prayers and thoughts of all kinds.

Although she changed after her stroke more than a decade and a half ago, I prefer to think of her as the vivacious, outgoing woman with the amazing sense of humor (as is par for the course in that family!), who raised my favorite uncle.

So my friend Kim is getting married in Wyoming this September, and I’m going to be her matron of honor. (Yes, this means I have to wear a dress. And it’s a RED dress. Try not to faint. [I’ll even take pictures so you can see this historic occasion.])

So Michael and I have been looking online for cheap flights.

And failing miserably.

However, someone stopped by to visit me at work yesterday, and suggested we take the train.

“The train? We have a train system?”

OK, it wasn’t quite that bad, but it just wasn’t anything I had considered. So I looked into it. The prices are comparable, except that I have more than four inches of leg room in the seats, and one can get sleeping rooms, and those come with meals included.

The more I thought about it, the more excited I got. I mean, the train! It makes me think of “Murder on the Orient Express” and “The Wild Wild West” and Cass Scenic Railroad all rolled into one. Of course it’s not going to be like that, but it will be two days riding on the train, with leg room and beds and meals.

How awesome is that?

Plus, it’s TRAIN!

So, it looks like we’re going to be taking the train to Denver, and then driving to Jackson Hole, WY in September. And we’re going to spend one night in Denver, so if anyone is going to be in Denver on 15 September, we’ll be spending the day there, waiting for our train!

Wheeeee!!!!

New flower pr0n, including my spring barren front garden, and a truly frightening mutant daffodil. (I kid you not, these daffodils frighten me.)