Category: Uncategorized

crap: comments i deleted

dammit all to hell, i deleted a whole slew of legit comments along with the 100+ spam ones i had waiting.  i hate this freakin interface for comment moderation, it sucks.  it was better in the old version of the kat box————it would be easier if i could just whitelist/approve those who comment regularly in one fell swoop and avoid this 6 or 7 time a year disaster, but noooooooo, I can only really control the blacklist and that’s stupid.

so.

anyway.

i’m sorry! i did get to read a bunch of nice comments, but then poof, they got obliterated with all the pieces of spam.  my bad.  thanks for posting comments—i read them all even if i accidentally delete the hell out of them before they get posted to the blog

shhh don’t tell

Minime’s getting a new bicycle.  This is pretty exciting!  She’s been bugging the snot out of me for a new bike for a few months now ever since one of the neighbor girls got a snazzy new ride–ya know, something big with gears to change and so on.

Minime found the bike of her dreams at Target.  Bubblegum pink, it’s a total beach cruiser bicycle…all it needs is a big basket for carrying sunscreen and a towel.  This bike is retro and modern all at once…and I bought it today while Minime was gone to her dad’s house.

In buying it, though, I admit having a complete brain hiccup.  We have a bike rack for my car, but if I’m only moving one of our bikes, I just put the backseat down and throw the bike in the back.  Works for her bike, and even works for my bike if I use the quick release to pop the front wheel off…so I didn’t put the bike rack on the back of the car, wasn’t going to need it, right?  I didn’t consider that the selected bike was a full size adult bike (I forever think of Minime as ittybitty even though she’s closer to my height by the second) and that this bike did not have a quick release wheel.  SH*T!

It took me nearly 20 minutes to get the damn bike (yeah, after 10 minutes of wrestling with it, the bike went from being a cute bike to being a damn bike) in the car.  I would like to point out that no Target employees offered to help at all.  None.  Other shoppers offered to help, and I did take one gentleman up on his offer to lift the bike in through the hatch while I pulled it through from the front.  Thanks to his help, I was able to get the bike in the car, and it only took another 10 minutes of effort to get the bike angled so that I could both close the trunk and have enough room to drive.  Phewwwwwwwwwwwwww.

But don’t tell Minime!  I’m giving her this bodacious pink bike for Valentine’s Day for she is indeed my sweetheart.  It’s locked in the storage building completely out of sight, tee hee!  I’m pretty excited…and my back hurts like hell from wrestling with the damn bike, but I’m sure the pain will be worth the look of surprise on her face on Valentine’s Day!

i miss my grandfather today

I was just eating a cookie in the bubble bath, thinking about someone whose quick wit and inquisitiveness remind me a lot of my grandfather…and as I’ve gotten older, I recognize that I have my own similarities to Gramps, too.

Gramps was a doctor and a darn good one.  He was really good at listening to not just what his patients said, but what they didn’t say and what their body language conveyed about how much pain they were really in or how long they’d been feeling under the weather.  His patients didn’t always pay in full, and sometimes they couldn’t pay at all, but he still saw them anyway…I remember in high school someone telling me how rich my family must be if my granddad was a doctor, and I said no,  not at all…because Gramps would accept payment in corn or tomatoes or whatever the person presented when their pride made them want to offer something for his service when there was no money in their pockets.   There were some very financially lean times in his practice, but he always took good care of his patients to the point that I still get thank you’s and compliments about the care he provided so many years ago.  I’d like to think that I echo some of his compassion for others in the things I do, even though I didn’t choose the field of medicine.

Gramps was a complete smartass, but subdued.  Gramps wasn’t a loud class clown sort, but he always had a witty observation to make, very tongue in cheek…he introduced me to Monty Python, something I still appreciate and enjoy years later. 

He had his pilot’s license and he co-owned a plane.  Gramps took me up in his plane when I was very small,  and that was my first taste of both how big the world is and how much of it there is to enjoy if you just make the effort to be a part of it.  Gramps was not a bystander in life by any stretch of the imagination.

He had an extensive music collection, ranging from classical to Willie Nelson to the Stones to Pink Floyd and everywhere in between.  Gramps loved music, and he loved working on his wide variety of audio equipment to get the sound just right for whatever he was playing.  Gramps got me my first CD player and my very first CD, and I remember how he wanted me to listen and notice the clarity of the sound compared to that of a cassette tape, and notice how the sound differed from the warmer sound of a record.

I’m a lot like him in the way that I always want to learn something new, and I’m also like him in my penchant for driving fast just to see what the engine can do.  He never stopped learning about medicine or technology or music or anything else he could absorb; I can’t stop learning either or I feel like I’m wasting time. 

Gramps passed away soon after my first year of college during a time that was especially tough for me in about a million other ways.  If Gramps were around today, I think he’d be most tickled with the MP3 players that are so commonplace now, and I hate that he didn’t get to see how exponentially fast technology changed so soon after he passed away…he didn’t get to see the home computer or Internet or blogs or any of this that we take for granted nowadays.

Anyway.  Today I miss Gramps.  I think he’d like some of you guys a lot.

computer crapped out

my computer bit the dust in the wee hours of saturday morning…which kinda messed up my mojo on catching on my blog and some school work, but I’ve rounded up a spare in the meantime to get me through.  i haven’t had much of a chance to fool with it yet, but i’m not too worried about it because this is my opportunity to plug mozy–i use the free home version of mozy (mozy.com) to back up files i don’t want to lose; it’s beautiful, just set it and forget it!  if you have more to back up than the freebie will allow, the other versions are reasonably priced too.  check it out!

hey!

just a quick shout out, friends—it’s been a busy, a little hectic this week as i kicked it all off with a stomach flu and then there’s been work and somewhere extra to be every day this week and it’s kind of like eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek.  but i’m still with ya, ready to blog a bit when i hopefully have a few extra minutes this weekend.