Who Needs Role Models?

I’ve been building web pages for over 15 years now, and one thing I know is that the web is not stable. Things happen that cause problems and the more you can do to protect yourself and your work the better. 

So an exchange I had on a forum I read was very interesting. I asked the question “what offline blog editor do you use?” And this prompted several replies. At first I was pleased, as I was hoping to get suggestions for offline editors. Right now I use MarsEdit, but there are some things about it that I don’t really like, so I was wondering if there were other options out there. 

So my newest life plan is to try out quitting sugar (and basically anything sweet) for the next few weeks. I started on Sunday, July 1st, which must have been a week ago now, right? I have discovered a few things in the short period I’ve been off sugar:

• I am, sadly, addicted to caffeine. Mark was telling me that and I was sure he was wrong, but man, today without Diet Coke, my head was aching and my temper was short.
• The cravings are ugly. I find myself thinking about sweets at the most random times. And if I don’t immediately start doing something else, they can end up taking over my head.
• Tea and toothpaste are my new best friends. I have drunk about a gallon of green tea today (read somewhere that it inhibits appetite — maybe because you’ve got so much tea in your stomach?) and brushed my teeth like four times (my dentist will fall over in a dead faint).

I feel almost ridiculous posting anything about this experiment after only two days, but I also feel like if I don’t I’ll give up sooner.

In order to open our gate, I have to crouch down to dog level, reach my arm through the slats in the gate to pull up the latch and then push the gate open. Normally, this is a pleasant opportunity for my dogs to greet me. McKinley will push his head through the slat and Storm would jump around trying to find the best way to get to me. [caption id=“attachment_593” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Stormageddon and McKinley guard the gate[/caption] But today McKinley didn’t come to the gate right away, and this gave Storm the chance to get right up to the slats where my face and arm are reaching in. Normally, I would just let her lick me, open the gate, and move on. Today, when she licked my arm, I looked down and saw sludge. My friend was telling me about how she had to clean up after her cat threw up this morning. Apparently the cat had eaten a spider and the spider egg sac. When it threw them back up the egg sac opened and all the baby spiders were crawling around in the cat barf. That’s pretty gross. Another friend was asking on Facebook for suggestions for what to do when a 4-year-old toddler pukes in the car on a road trip 1 hour away from anywhere. That’s also pretty gross. When I told these stories to my husband, he reminded me of the last time Jaryth got sick. He wandered around downstairs crying “Where’s mommy?” I came out of my office, picked him up, asked what was wrong, and he threw up in my face. That was exceptionally gross. But all of these things were surpassed today when I realized that I had been licked by a puppy with a mouthful of half-eaten slug guts. I thought cleaning her mouth of slug guts was bad. Being licked by that mouth is worse. Thank you Storm, for helping me develop a very strong anti-nausea reflex. [caption id=“attachment_595” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Stormy shows that she has no slugs on the menu right now.[/caption]

I was reading Leo Babuata’s site Zen Habits for a while now, and one of the things he recommends is the idea of living without goals. This is something I struggle with. I struggle with the idea that I should declutter my life of goals. I could argue that goals are how I’ve achieved what I have in my life. But when I think more closely, the reality is that the goals were a side note. In fact, some of the things I am most happy with or most proud of happened without any goal around them at all. For instance:

Stormageddon is a great dog. She’s smart, and very friendly and happy, and she loves to eat. I should clarify, when I say she likes to eat, I should say that she likes to eat anything that even slightly resembles food. Other dogs in my life have liked to eat, and liked food, but not to Storm’s extent. She eats just about anything.

• Grass and grass clippings are a favorite. Shasta used to roll in grass, turning himself green, but as far as I could tell, beyond the occasional snack, he didn’t eat grass.
• Paper, especially paper that might have had food on it at one point (like a dirty paper towel or a tissue). McKinley used to raid the trash can for tissues, but he just chewed them and spat them out. Storm may be spitting them out, but it’s hard to say, in the blizzard of tissues when she’s found one.
• Of course, people food makes her almost manic, like most dogs. I carried some cherries out to the hammock, and I thought she was going to jump into the bowl she wanted them so badly. I wouldn’t give her any, mostly because I was afraid she’d eat the pits as well as the cherry flesh.
• But the worst thing that she eats regularly is slugs, well, slugs and snails.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, and one thing we have a lot of is slugs (and snails). I tell my friends my puppy eats slugs and they say “ooo, can she come to my garden?” But they don’t understand the true horror of it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve been trained from a young age not to like snails and slugs are a close second. My mother used to have me step on the snails that she found in her garden. At around age 10, I thought to ask her why she didn’t just step on them herself. “Because I don’t like it when they scream,” she answered. To this day, I can’t step on a snail without cringing. And that is after I even asked a High School science teacher if snails could scream when you stepped on them. He told me that any whistle or squeak sound you might hear would only be the air escaping from their shell as you crushed them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I wasn’t relieved by that explanation. But screaming aside, that’s not the problem with Storm and her favorite snack. After all, slugs don’t have a shell to whistle or squeak when puppy teeth crush them. No, the problem is that slugs are like peanut butter. They glue themselves to her mouth. She walks around after eating a slug with slug guts dripping from her jaws. Literally! Yesterday morning I thought she had grass hanging out of her mouth. So, before I let her come in I reached in to get it out, and we almost discovered if she’ll eat barf. Who am I kidding, of course she would! Slug guts feel exactly as disgusting as you might imagine they do. Luckily she’s cute. [caption id=“attachment_598” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Luckily for her, she’s cute, even if she does steal my chair[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_574” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Storm and McKinley playing with the tug”][/caption]
McKinley is enjoying having someone to play with.

So, for some reason my blog has gotten targeted by comment spammers just recently. The comments on this blog are (were!) moderated so none of the lame attempts to spam my site were getting through. But I still had to deal with getting dozens of notifications a day. I received 48 new comments to moderate in just 12 hours. So I turned comments off. Who knows, I might turn them on again at a future date. But at this point, if anyone wants to chat about what I’m writing here, you’ll just have to do it via FB or some other location. Sorry for the inconvenience. And to all you spammers out there - F-OFF!

So, I’ve had an iPad since the first day the iPad 1 came out. And I’ve been reading books in the Kindle reader for iPad almost that long. I am a long-time book reader. In fact, when I got the iPad I didn’t think that ebooks would hold that much of a draw for me. After all, I love the feel of a good book in my hand, the smell of the glue holding the perfect binding of the paperbacks together, the crispness of the pages, yes, even the jolt awake when the hardback falls into my face while reading in bed. But in the two years since the iPad 1 has come out, I’ve changed. I like to think of it as growing. Now, I prefer to read books on my iPad, iPod, and in the cloud reader on my laptop. I love that when I get to page 110 on my iPad, I can open up my iPod and be right there on that page. This is better than when in Jr. High I learned how to almost subconsciously remember where I was in a book without bookmarks to combat the teasing people who would grab my books from me and move or remove the markers in an effort to thwart my knowing where I was. (I also learned the best hiding places for reading at my Jr. High—back in the library stacks on one of the lowest shelves where no books were stored was the best. No bullies ever venture into the library.) When Apple changed the rules and removed the bookstore links from the apps, I quickly bookmarked your site in my mobile Safari and made sure that that bookmark was synched to all my devices. And when you announced the Kindle Store, I saved the location as an app on my iPad so I could always get to it quickly.

So, this morning we got back from our shopping trip and walk and I brought in the grocery bag (in my reusable wolf bag) and the cat carrier we are using to transport our new puppy in. [caption id=“attachment_456” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Stormageddon the day after we got her”][/caption] I thought about being lazy and just put the kennel down and thought, “No, I’ll put it away right now, so it’s not cluttering up the kitchen.” I then walked to where McKinley’s leash and backpack go, put them away and then walked to the storage area and put away the carrier. Yay me! [caption id=“attachment_457” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“McKinley’s leash hung up by the door”][/caption] A few minutes later I realized that I hadn’t put away the groceries. So I went back to the kitchen where I’d left the bag to put them away. No bag. But Jaryth had moved the chair by the door so he could get a cup of water from the sink. So, I guess he moved the bag. Started searching the most likely areas a toddler would put a bag of groceries—in other words I looked around the kitchen floor. No bag. So I looked in the living room and dining room. No bag. “Jaryth, do you know what happened to the grocery bag? You know, the one with the wolf on it?” Blank stare, still no bag. Mark starts helping to look about then. He looks outside where Jaryth had been playing in the rocks, in the barn, in the shed, in the trash cans, in the car. No bag. I am starting to wonder if I imagined buying groceries. As the bag is no where! I give up looking, and decide to take Storm, who has woken up with all the commotion, outside to do her business. Mark comes out and says “I found it! Now you have to find it!” Of course, I’m thinking “I’ve been looking for it for the past 20 minutes, what makes you think I could find it now that you’ve found it?” He asks, “What else were you carrying when you brought in the bag?” For those of you playing along at home, go back and look at the second photo in this post. Note that BEHIND McKinley’s backpack is a bag with a wolf on it. [caption id=“attachment_458” align=“aligncenter” width=“199” caption=“what the leash rack should look like—sans bag”][/caption] Most of the time, I do the stupid things done in this household, much as I’d like to lay the blame on any toddlers or animals in the vicinity.

One of my favorite holidays is St. Patrick’s Day probably because I get to drink beer, eat corned beef and potatoes and just have a good time with leprechauns. This is a picture I drew of a leprechaun. I did it based on instructions from the About.com drawing and sketching website. Thanks Helen! Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone!