(no subject)
Jun. 17th, 2006 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cleolindaSo, it's been a while. Well, for me, anyway--a few days without posting is a bit of a gap for me. So here's a rundown of what's been going on:
>> I have been cleaning, still, more. I, uh, acquired a ton more Kylie Minogue and have been using that as my cleaning music. Now that we're in Stage Two, I'm starting to go through boxes of magazine clippings, and... it's difficult. You know The Mysteries of Harris Burdick? I pretty much look at any picture as a potential "mystery" to jumpstart a story or a character. Who is that? No, I mean, I know it's a picture of Naomi Watts in a scarf, but who could it be? Why is she wearing that scarf? Where did she get it? Did someone give it to her? Did she knit it? Is she the kind of person who knits jaunty red scarves, or just the kind of person who buys them? Where is she going in it? And so on and so forth. Granted, it's been easier to let go now that there are such vast image galleries online; if it was related to a movie or a celebrity, you can probably find the same shot online. But sometimes I save pictures of beautiful houses or exotic scenery. I have been known to decoupage every now and then. And anything I'm actually interested in--particularly true crime--I tend to save articles on it. So it's gonna take some time and some tough love, is what I'm saying.
Meanwhile, the very quiet, mellow, close-knit message board (population: 1650) where I'm a mod got mentioned in Entertainment Frickin' Weekly, of all things. We're already getting new posters who are hellbent on replying to every thread without really caring about punctuation or reading anyone else's posts. Because, you know, it's all about people reading yours and seeing how cool you are. That, and we got written up as "a board for rants against celebrities," which is so not what we are. The board's not any more like that than the comments here are--the tone is remarkably similar, actually. Civil, literate, laidback, fun. Sigh.
(I'm PrincessCleo over there. We were recommended in the EW article by Heather and Jessica at Go Fug Yourself, which was really sweet. Their usernames are, appropriately enough, "Heather" and "Jessica.")
>> Sister Girl has finished her semester course on bread and is going whitewater rafting this weekend, possibly. She's trying to get out of it because, as she says, "I don't even have a swimsuit!" Maybe she means a raft-appropriate suit, because she was eager enough to get into the pool earlier this week. Meanwhile, she had me clean up her room on the fly, if by "clean" you mean "sear some of the nuclear waste off the top," because that room ain't never gonna be clean unless we nuke it from orbit (the only way to be sure), and I gouged my toe on something. That was this morning, and I am not happy. Also, I am not happy because she wanted it "cleaned" because a guy was coming over, and I had just woken up and looked like hell, so now I'm trapped in my room because I can't go out with my hair pointing in forty directions, and I can't get to the bathroom to wash it, either.
>> My stepfather had me looking up Revolution-era drum pieces and general information because he's going to be playing at the American Village as part of their Fourth of July reenactments. I was able to find "Connecticut Halftime" for him, but (surprisingly), not much else. Even Wikipedia failed me, y'all.
(No, I don't know if he'll have to wear a wig.)
>> My mother has had a very successful week at work so far; she's already come across a professor who was sent home for drinking on the job, a university cop who apparently files EEOC complaints recreationally ("And as soon as that one's resolved, he just turns right around and files another one on something else!" they said), a woman who works with her three ex-husbands and her current spouse and may not stop until she's married everyone in the department, and an astronaut preparing a trip to Antarctica to study some sea creature who lives a mile below the surface but has proven to cure some kinds of cancer. "You pretty much have to sell your firstborn to get into his building," she was told, which I find interesting, because it implies that people want to get into his building. Apparently cancer-curing astronauts have a lot of groupies.
>> Pthoolhu escaped our pool-draining efforts in the night and has been grumpy ever since. The pool frogs, led by our friend Sawyer, were louder than ever, which caused us to do some logical calculus and realize that, if we had cleaned, relined and refilled the pool and the frogs were still there... they must be in the water. Seriously, it took us way too long to figure that out. In our defense, however, they stay in the trees during the day, so it's not like you could look into the pool and see them. No, thefreaks frogs come out at night. In fact, we called Animal Control to come look at the situation, and Animal Control Guy told us that we probably had about a hundred frogs in the trees behind our house. Clearly, Pthoolhu was raising an amphibian army to revenge himself on us all.
So one night--Tuesday, I think--Mom got it into her head to go huntin'. And I went out there with her, because I have a blog. Sadly, that is the actual reason I went. Anyhoo, she's out there with a ten-foot pole net and a flashlight, and I'm too busy antsing around and running away to be of much help. They're small frogs--one could probably fit inside a tennis ball--but I was terrified that they were going to jump on me and... frog all over me. It's not a phobia, exactly--more of an instinctive reaction beyond my control: if something jumps on me, in my clothes or in my hair, I lose my fool mind. This may have come from having previously lived in a sixty-year-old house where you could wake up with a roach up your sleeve. Also, there is an apocryphal story that a snake fell off the top of an open front door onto me when I was a toddler and my parents were working in the front yard. I'm just saying, anything wriggly gives me the screaming heebs. But, again: I have a blog; I couldn't not watch the fun.
I think my stepfather, despite not having a blog, had the same idea because he was leaning over the deck railing. My mother's creeping around the pool, in the dark, with a flashlight in one hand and a pole in the other. We immediately find a frog sitting on the pool ladder two feet in front of me, and I run away. She makes a grab for it, but has a little trouble maneuvering with both hands full. The frog jumps into the deep end, breaststrokes down a few feet and then--hilariously--sort of spreads out, goes limp, and glides down into the deeps. We saw the frogs "float" both up and down, and it looked really relaxing, to tell you the truth. Except for the part where they're frogs and they give me the heebs. Mom gives me the light and the search-and-destroy mission moves over to the shallow end of the pool, until I find a frog sitting on the pool steps and I run away. "Reminds me of Vietnam," says my stepfather up on the deck.
Mom starts to get kind of good at frog-huntin', actually. She's using the flat net, as opposed to the bag-shaped one, and has me shine the light in the frogs' eyes while she ferries them over, one at a time, to the back fence and flings them over into the trees. We hear them start croaking again ("RAAAWWWWK") almost immediately, so there's very little death involved, or if there is, they get over it pretty quickly. She catches five, total. But there is one, one frog that we cannot catch: Sawyer. Unlike the others, he is raaawwwking from the patio wall, and he manages to raaawwwk like a bullhorn right as Mom is about to catch one, thereby alerting her prey to the danger. Sneaky bastard. We never did locate him, although I'm pretty sure he's claimed the wrought-iron patio table for Sawyerland. So finally, about an hour later, we conceded defeat. "We have to make a pact to never speak of this night," says my stepfather. "Why?" asks my mother. "Because it's embarrassing."
Sawyer gives one last great big RAAAAAWWWWWWK as we leave, and out in the trees, you can hear a triumphant answering chorus of "RAAWWK, RAAWWK, RAAWK RAAWK RAAAAAWWWWWK." And if you are imagining a bunch of frogs headbanging and throwing devil horns with their little webbed toes out in the woods behind my house, I will not blame you.
>> I have been cleaning, still, more. I, uh, acquired a ton more Kylie Minogue and have been using that as my cleaning music. Now that we're in Stage Two, I'm starting to go through boxes of magazine clippings, and... it's difficult. You know The Mysteries of Harris Burdick? I pretty much look at any picture as a potential "mystery" to jumpstart a story or a character. Who is that? No, I mean, I know it's a picture of Naomi Watts in a scarf, but who could it be? Why is she wearing that scarf? Where did she get it? Did someone give it to her? Did she knit it? Is she the kind of person who knits jaunty red scarves, or just the kind of person who buys them? Where is she going in it? And so on and so forth. Granted, it's been easier to let go now that there are such vast image galleries online; if it was related to a movie or a celebrity, you can probably find the same shot online. But sometimes I save pictures of beautiful houses or exotic scenery. I have been known to decoupage every now and then. And anything I'm actually interested in--particularly true crime--I tend to save articles on it. So it's gonna take some time and some tough love, is what I'm saying.
Meanwhile, the very quiet, mellow, close-knit message board (population: 1650) where I'm a mod got mentioned in Entertainment Frickin' Weekly, of all things. We're already getting new posters who are hellbent on replying to every thread without really caring about punctuation or reading anyone else's posts. Because, you know, it's all about people reading yours and seeing how cool you are. That, and we got written up as "a board for rants against celebrities," which is so not what we are. The board's not any more like that than the comments here are--the tone is remarkably similar, actually. Civil, literate, laidback, fun. Sigh.
(I'm PrincessCleo over there. We were recommended in the EW article by Heather and Jessica at Go Fug Yourself, which was really sweet. Their usernames are, appropriately enough, "Heather" and "Jessica.")
>> Sister Girl has finished her semester course on bread and is going whitewater rafting this weekend, possibly. She's trying to get out of it because, as she says, "I don't even have a swimsuit!" Maybe she means a raft-appropriate suit, because she was eager enough to get into the pool earlier this week. Meanwhile, she had me clean up her room on the fly, if by "clean" you mean "sear some of the nuclear waste off the top," because that room ain't never gonna be clean unless we nuke it from orbit (the only way to be sure), and I gouged my toe on something. That was this morning, and I am not happy. Also, I am not happy because she wanted it "cleaned" because a guy was coming over, and I had just woken up and looked like hell, so now I'm trapped in my room because I can't go out with my hair pointing in forty directions, and I can't get to the bathroom to wash it, either.
>> My stepfather had me looking up Revolution-era drum pieces and general information because he's going to be playing at the American Village as part of their Fourth of July reenactments. I was able to find "Connecticut Halftime" for him, but (surprisingly), not much else. Even Wikipedia failed me, y'all.
(No, I don't know if he'll have to wear a wig.)
>> My mother has had a very successful week at work so far; she's already come across a professor who was sent home for drinking on the job, a university cop who apparently files EEOC complaints recreationally ("And as soon as that one's resolved, he just turns right around and files another one on something else!" they said), a woman who works with her three ex-husbands and her current spouse and may not stop until she's married everyone in the department, and an astronaut preparing a trip to Antarctica to study some sea creature who lives a mile below the surface but has proven to cure some kinds of cancer. "You pretty much have to sell your firstborn to get into his building," she was told, which I find interesting, because it implies that people want to get into his building. Apparently cancer-curing astronauts have a lot of groupies.
>> Pthoolhu escaped our pool-draining efforts in the night and has been grumpy ever since. The pool frogs, led by our friend Sawyer, were louder than ever, which caused us to do some logical calculus and realize that, if we had cleaned, relined and refilled the pool and the frogs were still there... they must be in the water. Seriously, it took us way too long to figure that out. In our defense, however, they stay in the trees during the day, so it's not like you could look into the pool and see them. No, the
So one night--Tuesday, I think--Mom got it into her head to go huntin'. And I went out there with her, because I have a blog. Sadly, that is the actual reason I went. Anyhoo, she's out there with a ten-foot pole net and a flashlight, and I'm too busy antsing around and running away to be of much help. They're small frogs--one could probably fit inside a tennis ball--but I was terrified that they were going to jump on me and... frog all over me. It's not a phobia, exactly--more of an instinctive reaction beyond my control: if something jumps on me, in my clothes or in my hair, I lose my fool mind. This may have come from having previously lived in a sixty-year-old house where you could wake up with a roach up your sleeve. Also, there is an apocryphal story that a snake fell off the top of an open front door onto me when I was a toddler and my parents were working in the front yard. I'm just saying, anything wriggly gives me the screaming heebs. But, again: I have a blog; I couldn't not watch the fun.
I think my stepfather, despite not having a blog, had the same idea because he was leaning over the deck railing. My mother's creeping around the pool, in the dark, with a flashlight in one hand and a pole in the other. We immediately find a frog sitting on the pool ladder two feet in front of me, and I run away. She makes a grab for it, but has a little trouble maneuvering with both hands full. The frog jumps into the deep end, breaststrokes down a few feet and then--hilariously--sort of spreads out, goes limp, and glides down into the deeps. We saw the frogs "float" both up and down, and it looked really relaxing, to tell you the truth. Except for the part where they're frogs and they give me the heebs. Mom gives me the light and the search-and-destroy mission moves over to the shallow end of the pool, until I find a frog sitting on the pool steps and I run away. "Reminds me of Vietnam," says my stepfather up on the deck.
Mom starts to get kind of good at frog-huntin', actually. She's using the flat net, as opposed to the bag-shaped one, and has me shine the light in the frogs' eyes while she ferries them over, one at a time, to the back fence and flings them over into the trees. We hear them start croaking again ("RAAAWWWWK") almost immediately, so there's very little death involved, or if there is, they get over it pretty quickly. She catches five, total. But there is one, one frog that we cannot catch: Sawyer. Unlike the others, he is raaawwwking from the patio wall, and he manages to raaawwwk like a bullhorn right as Mom is about to catch one, thereby alerting her prey to the danger. Sneaky bastard. We never did locate him, although I'm pretty sure he's claimed the wrought-iron patio table for Sawyerland. So finally, about an hour later, we conceded defeat. "We have to make a pact to never speak of this night," says my stepfather. "Why?" asks my mother. "Because it's embarrassing."
Sawyer gives one last great big RAAAAAWWWWWWK as we leave, and out in the trees, you can hear a triumphant answering chorus of "RAAWWK, RAAWWK, RAAWK RAAWK RAAAAAWWWWWK." And if you are imagining a bunch of frogs headbanging and throwing devil horns with their little webbed toes out in the woods behind my house, I will not blame you.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 06:05 pm (UTC)I can see why Tiny Moist Hands must have bothered you so much.
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Date: 2006-06-17 06:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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From:best line in this
Date: 2006-06-17 06:07 pm (UTC)I really like that man.
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Date: 2006-06-17 06:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 06:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2006-06-17 06:15 pm (UTC)Nice job predicting what I believe all of our first questions were going to be.
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Date: 2006-06-17 06:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2006-06-17 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 06:31 pm (UTC)http://www.mudcat.org/
Also index(not up to date or compleate):
http://sniff.numachi.com/~rickheit/dtrad/
You could always adopt a hungry snake for the frogs.
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Date: 2006-06-17 06:39 pm (UTC)Awesome.
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Date: 2006-06-17 06:49 pm (UTC)And yet within the short time it took to read and reread this entry... I'm giggling like a fool and have scared the cat.
So, basically, thanks!
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Date: 2006-06-17 07:12 pm (UTC)I don't know how they keep getting in--it's an above ground pool. I'm guessing they either jump from the deck, or adjescent trees (which I have to say, is really impressive.) It's the usual supsects over and over, too. I'm really able to tell which one is why by now.
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Date: 2006-06-17 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 07:35 pm (UTC)I love fishing, I love trying to catch fish.. but 1) I will not bait my own hook... WORMS.. EWW!!! and 2) I will not take my own fish off of the hook.. ewwww
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Date: 2006-06-18 01:24 am (UTC)I can handle taking the fish off sometimes though...depends on the size. :)
Speaking as a Drum and bugle corps alumni and retired Wikipedia admin....
Date: 2006-06-17 08:16 pm (UTC)Not so, my dear Cleo: Fife and Drum Corps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Fife_and_Drum_Corps)
Re: Speaking as a Drum and bugle corps alumni and retired Wikipedia admin....
Date: 2006-06-18 12:11 am (UTC)Songs are chosen on a number of criteria and can include both historically significant music and new pieces specifically composed or arranged to be played on fife and drum.
Yes, but I need *examples.* He was trying to figure out (in advance) what they'd want him to play. There wasn't anything in the article that he didn't already know.
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Date: 2006-06-17 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-18 12:14 am (UTC)But that's part of the reason I've never mentioned it here by name before--and it's why I'm mentioning it now, because if we're going to have a stampede of new members, we ought to at least go find some good people while we're at it.
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Date: 2006-06-17 08:28 pm (UTC)Ugh, I don't know how many times I've gotten trapped in my bedroom 'til well after midnight when my sister would invite boys over, so I can totally relate. The only way to get to the bathroom from my room is to cross the hall...and anyone sitting on the couch in the living room would see me darting across the hall. I've also gotten trapped in the bathroom before, too -- a couple of my parents' friends dropped in unannounced once while I was in the shower. The only clothes I had in there with me were pj's, and I really didn't want to go skipping out in front of them in my jammies, so I was stuck. I did make the best of it, though - there were magazines and my facial sauna was in there, so I did a bit of pampering whilst I waited.
Also, I have a fear of things jumping / falling on me -- I once had
the world's biggesta spider fall on my hand when I shut my bedroom door. It had been resting on the top of the door, so when I shut it, it pushed the spider off, and it landed right on my hand. >_< Thankfully, though, that incident didn't give me a fear of shutting doors.Oh, and the local frogs like to hang out in our pool, too.
I think this may hold the record for longest comment ever. Sorry.
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Date: 2006-06-17 09:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-18 12:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 10:03 pm (UTC)We're already getting new posters who are hellbent on replying to every thread without really caring about punctuation or reading anyone else's posts. Because, you know, it's all about people reading yours and seeing how cool you are.
I've noticed that. I have a friend who joined a week or so ago and I was looking at the new members this morning, trying to figure out which one was my friend, and I noticed a lot of new members in the last couple of days. One of them had joined on the sixteenth, and already had like 20 posts. This should be fun.
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Date: 2006-06-18 12:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 10:27 pm (UTC)Wikipedia has been odd. If I put something in their search engine I won't get anything but googling will give me the wikipedia page.
And jewelry linkspam: http://www.crazydaisydesigns.com/index.html I think it's more expensive than what you'd find at 1928 (which is finally being carried by JCPenney huzzah!) but Crazy Daisy Designs tends to use a lot of pearls of various colors and has a huge selection of rings. They'll be at Lumos 2006 which is where I found the link.
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Date: 2006-06-17 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-18 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 10:54 pm (UTC)See, this is the real reason I go to family gatherings.
And hopefully only good can come from SF being in EW. It's not a great place for trolls in the first place, really - mostly we'd snark on them.
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Date: 2006-06-17 11:16 pm (UTC)Yeah, about that: Would it be possible to put up some kind of notice to our new members explaining that we want to keep up our high standard, so don't forget to capitalize and punctuate? There's no need to alienate anyone in particular (*coughMissSchaedenfreud*), but that way people might take the point without causing a ruckus.
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Date: 2006-06-18 12:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2006-06-17 11:17 pm (UTC)*imagines scruffy frog croaking with a Southern accent*
ROFL
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Date: 2006-06-18 12:51 am (UTC)...of course, it's at this exact moment I realize I don't have a frog icon. This must be fixed.
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Date: 2006-06-18 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-18 01:19 am (UTC)And if you are imagining a bunch of frogs headbanging and throwing devil horns with their little webbed toes out in the woods behind my house, I will not blame you. I loved that. Now I want an icon of a frog with red horns on it's head. :)