Random (but not really)

Thursday, September 18, 2008

DINOSAURS!

Invisible Coconuts
If you are confused, see here and here.

Wyoming

As you may have surmised, I spent a week traveling, because my friends Kim and Mike decided to get married in Wyoming.

Because I hate having to sit still, we decided to take the train instead of flying, and since it was an option, we decided to make Denver our end point, and after the wedding, spent a day in Denver.

(See previous post for fun in Denver)

Since we were going to be in such a scenic place, I decided to go hog wild with my camera. I took hundreds of pictures. About half those I deleted upon downloading them to my computer. Now I’m going through and picking out the photographs I really like. I’ve gone through the first several days already, and found several pictures I liked, however, I still have some to go, and have not even begun to play with the panorama program that came with my camera.

Here are a couple of pictures I particularly liked.

Wyoming_9

Lake_Jenny_3

Snake_River_4

Lake_Jenny_2

My set of Wyoming photos is on Flickr. More photos will be added to the set in the coming days.

Written by Michelle at 8:00 am    

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Categories: Photos  

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Fun Fun Wherever I Go

So we were in the midwest for Kim & Mike’s wedding, and as usual, I managed to amuse myself.

We found an “Alaskan Fur Store” in Jackson, which may or may not explain Alaskans.

Alaskan_Fur_Store

Sorry. None of you were worth $34.99 (or even $24.99 without tail) for a highly disturbing joke. However, you may be pleased to note that I included the phone number, on the off chance you wanted to order one for yourself.

If anyone orders this, let me state upfront that I do NOT want pictures of anyone I know modeling these things.

I also relaxed.

Michelle_Relaxing

Here you can see me relaxing at Jenny Lake in the Grand Teton National Park.

No, they are not boots, but they were sneakers with laces. And it’s not like I was hiking. We were just walking around the lake.

After the wedding and national park visiting, we took a detour to visit Janiece and Anne.

The fabulous Janiece and her Smart Man allowed us to stay out their house, despite not having anyone to vouch for the fact that we were not deranged killers. I felt very lucky she trusted us so.

We went to the Coors Brewery for the tour, and Michael was pleased to discover that one of the beers he could “taste test” was Blue Moon.

Mmm_Beer

This made up for the fact that he was initially disturbed to discover that Coors made Blue Moon and Killians, two of his favorite beers. (I do have pictures with Janiece at the Brewery, but they weren’t nearly silly enough for this post.)

We then met up with Anne, and wandered around the Denver Museum of Science.

Invisible_Coconuts0001

INVISIBLE COCONUTS!

(Confused? See here.)

The museum had many interactive exhibits. Here I am modeling the mule deer ears.

mule_deer_ears

They really didn’t make me hear any better. Or perhaps this was one just more exhibit I went to use that was not working at the time. Apparently it’s not safe to go anywhere with me.

After the museum we went out to dinner, where Janiece was surprised with brownies.

Janiece_gets_brownies

As you can see, Janiece thought they were icky, and said she was going to give them to her Smart Man to eat.

And here we were after dinner.

Happy_UCFers

You’ll notice there is only ONE glass per person visible on the table. You’ll also notice that Anne is the only one who looks consistently sane in these pictures.

That’s all I’m going to say about that.

I’m so glad we were able to take some extra time on our trip to go by Denver and finally meet Janiece and Anne in person! As you can see, we did have some small amount of fun.

Written by Michelle at 6:26 pm    

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Categories: Photos,UCF  

Word Association III

Fats Waller

(to get around the character limit, write the previous word = and then your word.)

Written by Michelle at 8:00 am    

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Categories: Non-Sequiturs,Uncategorized  

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Tasty Tuesday

These are one of the things Michael makes that Grandmom really likes. She says she thinks she likes them better than hamburgers.

Turkey Burgers
~1 lb ground turkey, as high fat as you can find
1 egg
~1/4 cup bread crumbs
minced onion
parsley
garlic powder
kosher salt
fresh pepper

Mush together all ingredients. Make patties and place on foil covered cookie sheet. Cover sheet with foil. If you will eat the burgers the same day, place them in the refrigerator until you’re ready to cook them–at least an hour.

If you’re making them for later, place covered tray in freezer, and freeze several hours or overnight. Stack burgers with waxed paper between layers, wrap tightly in foil, and place in freezer bag. Can be cooked thawed or frozen.

Written by Michelle at 8:00 am    

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Categories: Food  

Monday, September 15, 2008

Run Hide! Vacation Photos!

OK, here are a couple of photos, primarily so I can provide proof that I did, in fact, wear a dress.

But first:

Hannah_Rose0001

The marvelous, happy, and photogenic Hannah!

 

Jackson_Hole_0001

The happy couple and Hannah.

 

Jackson_Hole_0002

Finally, the proof!

It’ll take me awhile to process the rest of the pictures, so you’re safe for now.

Written by Michelle at 10:33 am    

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Categories: Photos  

Let’s Take a Tour… Part III: The Main Page and Everywhere Else

One of the things I talk about when I teach web design is the main page for your site. If you have a website of any complexity, you want your main page/splash page to help people find what they’re looking for.

Weblogs are nice and all, but it’s very difficult to find your way around someone’s site if you find them through their weblog. Frankly, most people assume that’s all their is and look no further, but I think it’s interesting to see what else people have to say about themselves.

Since as I mentioned before, this weblog is not all there is to my website, my splash page has links to take you wherever else you’d like to go.

As with the book page, you can view the page with IE, but the menus don’t work IE (the worst thing is they almost work IE7, but not entirely, which is worse than not working at all). So you really want to use Firefox or Safari or anything else. Then you’ll get to see the menus, which make me very very happy.

I was pretty much elated for a week when I got the menus to work.

What if you’re using IE? The buttons take you to a main page, and from there you can access the pages available on the sub menu.

Then again, the layout of the page also makes me squeal with glee. (You did know I was easily amused, right?) I love the way the layout moves when the page is resized. I learned more about web design working on that page than on anything else, because that’s where I’d test things as I’d learn them.

But to give credit where credit is due, Michael created the random image and quote generators for me. I could do it myself now, but when I initially decided what I wanted, he wrote the code for me. So yay Michael!

You may notice that the splash page has a title that doesn’t make much sense. At the bottom there’s a link for “the little cyclops puppy” and you can see where the title came from.

It won’t make a lot of sense even then, but that’s what the title of my site has been since 1998, and it seems silly to change now.

You’ll also see links to the Cats page, where you can see pictures of my fine felines. There is also a link to the Quotes page, so if you want to read all my random quotes at once, plus some quotes that didn’t get put into the random quote generator, that’s the place to go.

The most popular page is the Morgantownies site. This is a page that was created by Gina, Erin, and me one day when we were really bored, and has snowballed out of control since then. Someone e-mailed me and told me I should enter everything into a database and make the page searchable and add photos…

No. It started as a lark. I’ll continue to maintain it, but I do NOT have the time to invest in creating a database and entering the data, and I definitely don’t have the time to make a searchable index, and adding photo–to do it right would chew up bandwidth like you wouldn’t believe. This is a site I pay for myself, and aside from the Amazon links, I don’t have advertising, and I plan to keep it that way.

Maybe one day when I’m rich and have oodles of free time. But not today, this week, or this year.

There are other pages as well, many of which have not been updated in a disgustingly long time. One day I may do something about that, but again, not today.

So there you go. My website is more than my weblog. Feel free to go explore and have fun. Or not. Either way is fine with me.

Written by Michelle at 8:00 am    

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Categories: Computers & Technology  

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Sunday Flower Pr0n

You can tell the summer is winding down and fall is almost here.

Sage

Here’s some sage from my herb garden. As long as I cover the garden with leaves in late fall, the plant should come back in the spring.

 

Sedum

Sedum that came from S. Thanks again S!

 

Hydrangea

Now the hydrangea is starting to turn brown. But it still has plenty of purple.

Written by Michelle at 10:00 am    

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Categories: House & Garden,Photos  

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Woo Hoo!

Congratulations to Kim and Mike!

Photos will follow in the coming days, including photos of me in…

(drum roll please)

a dress!

I don’t even know how long it’s been since I last wore a dress, but it’s been years.

Let’s hope I don’t stumble in my heels and break my wrist or something.

Written by Michelle at 10:00 am    

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Categories: Non-Sequiturs  

13 September

Happy 1st birthday Helena and James!

(yes, those twins)

Written by Michelle at 8:00 am    

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Categories: Non-Sequiturs  

Friday, September 12, 2008

Friday Cat Blogging

Kit

When is the nice woman going to give me more treats?
(Note: Nice woman is not me. Nice woman is my grandmother.)

 

Kit

I am cute, even if I am underexposed.

 

Kat

I’m cute. I just can’t help myself.

 

Kat

I will not look at you. You are not worthy.

 

Kat

What on earth could that be?!

Written by Michelle at 8:00 am    

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Categories: Cats,Photos  

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Let’s Take a Tour… Part II: Books

So yesterday I insisted that my website was about more than my weblog–and then proceeded to talk about little but the blog.

Let’s move on today.

A major part of this site is my book blog and book pages.

This started as a way for me to keep track of books I’d read–especially after I’d sold them back to the used bookstore–and to remember what happened in a book–especially a continuing series.

It reached it’s current incarnation several years ago, although the amount of change it’s gone through seems to say that things may again change in the future.

But maybe not. It’s a lot of work to modify those pages.

First thing I’ll note is that when you go to the genre pages, you won’t get the full deal if you’re using IE. I’ll leave the rant for later, but suffice to say, IE doesn’t bother to follow the rules every other browser follows, so some of the really cool stuff I’ve done doesn’t work in IE. This doesn’t mean you can’t view the pages–everything works fine, and I have a style sheet JUST for freaking IE that ignores the really cool stuff I did. It just means you don’t get the drop down menus, which are really the heart of all the work I did.

So if you go to, say, the Fantasy page or the Mystery page, the menu at the top of the page contains various drop down menus listing every author I’ve read and reviewed. Yes, there are a lot names there. That menu stays with you as you browse the book pages, so you can quickly jump to another author.

There is little in the world that made me as happy as getting that menu system to work right, and making it easy to update.

So what if you’re using IE? You just jump down the page and can peruse the authors from there. Clicking on an author name will take you to the page. Everything works, but it’s just not as cool and useful.

Also, if you click on a book title or image, it will take you to Amazon, and I’ll get pennies for the purchase, that will eventually become a gift certificate which will eventually become a free book.

There is also a link to my on-line book database. This was my project for learning php and MySQL, and I was rather pleased with the way it turned out I must say. Unfortunately, my web host made some server changes in the past months, and my admin pages stopped working, and I haven’t had the time to try and fix them. So the database is about a year out of date. But still, it’s nice for trying to remember who wrote a book. And one day (HA!) I’d like to enter character names.

We’ll see how that goes.

So there’s another section of my site you may never have known existed.

Written by Michelle at 8:00 am    

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Categories: Books & Reading,Computers & Technology  

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Let’s Take a Tour… Part I: Writing

So those of you who don’t read this by RSS feed have seen how I’ve personalized Word Press, but believe it or not, there is more to this site than my blog.

Really!

I’ve maintained a personal website since 1998. Initially on Labyrinth, then on Earthlink, and then on various web hosting services. I started my weblog in February of 2002.

Why yes, I did all the coding my hand, thank you. All my web design was done in Arachnophilia, which was a code editor. So no permalinks or anything like that in the early years.

If you go back, what you’ll discover is that since I was writing for myself and sometimes erin (hi erin!), I wrote whatever came to mind. In essence it was to replace the paper journals that I was never capable of keeping up.

Obviously it worked in that I’ve been at this for over six years, but somewhere along the way I seem to have lost that sense of fearlessness about my writing I had then. For example, I can’t remember the last time I wrote about religion, and my posts about politics are few and far between.

Still, that’s a lot of words I’ve written.

I also have a section of writing in general, that contains links to short stories that came from my dreams (I have exceedingly weird dreams, and I sometimes used them as a writing exercise in coherency), and a couple of papers I wrote for school. Those were actually fun. There’s something about a good research paper…

Er… never mind.

OK. So, this somehow ended up being all about the blog anyway. Fine. Tomorrow then.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Tasty Tuesday

Before summer is completely over, take advantage of fall grilling.

Grilled Veggies

Fresh veggies: zucchini, yellow squash, cherry/grape tomatoes, mushrooms, orange and yellow pepper
Olive oil
White wine vinegar
Fresh parsley
Fresh oregano
Fresh rosemary
Fresh thyme
Fresh garlic
sea salt
Fresh pepper

Slice selected vegetables into large chunks. You’ll want mushrooms (which cook faster) to have larger chunks than the squash, which cooks more slowly.

Place veggies in a gallon sized ziploc bag (or two bags if you’re making a lot of vegetables. Pour olive oil and white wine vinegar over the veggies in approximately equal measure. You’ll want enough liquid to coat the vegetables.

Mince/crush several cloves of garlic (to taste) and add to veggie bag.

Collect your fresh herbs and crush them in a mortal and pestle with sea salt or kosher salt. Add the fresh herbs, salt, and pepper to the bag with the veggies.

Add more vinegar and oil if necessary.

Seal the bag and mix until the vegetables are well coated with the herb/garlic mixture.

Refrigerate for a couple of hours, until you’re ready to grill.

Written by Michelle at 8:00 am    

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Categories: Food  
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