Visit the kelpforest....

So, a few months ago I got an email reminding me I'd signed up at Tegaki, a Japanese blogging site where you draw all of your entries. Can't remember when I actually signed up there; it was an intriguing idea at the time, but I'd never actually used it. Anyway, a reminder was sent, and I had been thinking I been wishing for an oekaki board, as all the ones I used to be a member of seemed to have either disappeared or had such super advanced members I wasn't comfortable trying to post in them. Anyway, I gave it a try at the time; I need to go back there again and try to use it regularly. I'd posted these at Tumblr but never got around to posting them here. Fanarts done with the touchpad as I'd misplaced my tablet.

( Artz... )

(transferred from Tumblr - I should do this more often, but I don't usually write so much there...)




"Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you..."

So, I occasionally check out the tea tag (mostly looking for odd stuff), and along with neat images of tea cups and teapots, it seems the cool thing for the kids to do is take a picture of your canned ice tea and post it. I'm not sure why, but it's mostly Arizona brand, with captions like mmm, yum, my favorite etc. The next most common thing is a photo of a miniskirted lap, with hands holding a cuppa. Or a tea pot on a stack of books.

And what is it with tea imagery being labelled hipster and vintage? Last I knew, it wasn't exclusively those things.

"What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson, Joltin' Joe has left and gone away..."

Anyway. I picked this up at the 99¢ Only store while waiting for the bus. While this is still an Arizona can, I think Joe must be sad to wind up on the shelf there; he certainly looks it. Doesn't bode well. Arnold Palmer on the same can is going great guns, while poor Joe is shelved among the off-import coconut juice and the relabeled Monster coffee/energy drinks originally intended for sale in Korea.

Kind of reminded me of the coffee Coke they test marketed around here a few years ago. Coffee, but carbonated and sweet, with a tart undertone which I didn’t care for, like old burned gas station coffee. Not a big black coffee drinker anyway, so not for me. Sorry, Joe.

Not his first association with coffee - he used to plug Mr. Coffee machines when I was a kid and drip coffee machines were a new thing.

Well, waiting at the dentist for Angus to have a filling, there's no wifi, and I've forgotten to save something I was going to work on while I'm here out of an email, so I'll try to fill in one of those empty topic entries I put up for myself a while ago (Cheezus, that was in January!  What have I been doing?)  Providing I haven't completely forgotten how to write.

I wish my body would make up its damn mind.( TMI female stuff... )
Anyway, I need to make a doctor appointment, I know I’m overdue for an exam. And after badgering runsmuck to make one for himself, I suppose I’d better at least as a show of good faith.

Speaking of which, I get so damn mad at him about his health. He takes several medications for his chronic severe asthma. Most of these have a limit on the number of refills, by which time he is supposed to see his doctor again to make sure all of them are working correctly and get them refilled again. He’s been complaining lately that he just cannot shake the current wheeze he has, and when I question him, he’s been out of his rescue inhaler for a couple of weeks and his long term meds for a month and a half. All he’s been using is his nebulizer meds – pretty much the same stuff as his rescue inhaler, but requires a machine to turn it into vapor, so not very portable. He generally only uses the nebulizer as a last resort, but it was all he’d been using lately, including waking up in the middle of the night to use. He will not phone his doctor until I bully him into it, or I have to do it myself. Then, his doctor is very popular and quite often it’s a month and a half before he can get in, unless he can get a cancellation. I have been trying to get him to switch to a doctor in my medical group, where because it’s a group, you can at least see someone even if your own doctor isn’t available. Grrr.

Did I say the car is back in the shop as well? The check engine light was on when we got it back and the transmission seems not to have been hooked up right. When I drove it, quite often the engine would rev but not move, until suddenly it would engage and then leap forward. When we’d had it for about a week, John was driving and suddenly he couldn’t get it out of third gear. It’s been back at the shop for a week and a half now, and while they assured us there would be no charge to correct it, we have not heard yet how long it’s going to be and when we might have our vehicle back again. This dealership is getting a nasty review on Yelp, once we get it back, and we’re finding somewhere else to have stuff done next time. Apparently they’re short-staffed and very busy, but too busy for a 5 minute update? Grrr again.

Luckily this time, runsamuck’s mom and grandmother were going back to Michigan for 3 weeks, so she offered to lend us her car while they’re away. Which is nice, because carrying groceries for 5 people half a mile back and forth – even with a cart – is kind of a pain. We do have a ton of reusable bags and the kids are always drafted to be pack horses, but buying anything in bulk (like a week’s worth at a time) is just impossible.

Work has finally upgraded us into the 21st Century by finally migrating us to Windows 7. The upside is that I have a new laptop I'd thought mine would be fixed - I needed a new power cable and a few of the keys on my keyboard didn't work, meaning I had to take a Spongebob roll-up keyboard with me when I went to meetings - but turns out it was out of warrantee, so they figured it was better to issue me a new one. The downside is they're much more locked down now, so I can't download my LJ client, among other handy little things I use, because it's not approved software. Sigh. I knew it was coming. So I'll just have to use the page.

I feel like Tumblr is making me forget how to write. The truth is I don't get much time on the family laptop (I just don't feel like hearing all the grumbling), so I'm using my Nook most of the time lately, and typing on it is really a pain in the ass, especially there. But here, I must have made a dozen placeholders for posts on topics that I haven't written. I thought I'd get some of them done while riding the bus the last three months, but I used the time to reread the original Sherlock Holmes instead. Haven't quite gotten through all of it, but nearly.

I think my last post was when the car blew up. We only got it back last week. It turned out it wasn't just the head, it was the long block - which meant the entire engine had to be replaced.  A week on each end was due to our having to come up with money for a deposit and to pay it off (so much for our tax refund - we still had to get a loan). We looked into buying a used engine, but they came with no guarantees, and John's experience with two used transmissions in the Kia's predecessor (one of which only lasted a couple of months) made us opt for new parts, some of which must have had to be shipped from Korea. John is a good haggler though, and they gave us about a 15% discount for taking so damn long.

With the price of gas though, I think I still should take the bus, even though there's no longer a route down the street my office is on and I have to walk a mile each way to the stop. I really don't mind the walk, but between it and still having to transfer, sometimes it was taking me two hours or more to get home. The Starbucks at my transfer point was getting way too much of my money.

Btw, if they ask, don't let them put two teabags in a Grande sized reusable cup. It's nicely strong, but $3.55 is too goddamned much for a cup of tea. And when I asked for a tall amount of water with one teabag in it, so it wasn't too weak, it took me five minutes to get across to the guy what I wanted. "ok, so you just want hot water? You want one teabag and no water?" I finally had to take the cup, show him there was a line inside for Tall, and tell him only fill it up to there, and no farther. Sheesh.

Anyway, I keep meaning to test out my son's bike to see if it's something I could ride the two miles from my first bus, thus saving the walking time and having to transfer, but I keep forgetting over the weekend.

Huh, this page says I can still send stuff to FB; I thought FB wasn't allowing that anymore.

Wonderful. When I looked at my profile the other day, I noticed a bunch of broken images links; apparently the website I had been using for images (before I got a Flickr account - pre-2006, maybe?) must have gone under. Which means that images in a lot of my earlier entries are now gone - I'd never moved any of them over. Well, that sucks. Not that anyone looks at my old posts anymore, but for my own records...I know I have the original image files in other places, it's just a major pain to try to replace them all.

Would have been nice to have some notification.

So I had to borrow a vehicle the other night to go pick up our poor Sedona, which runsamuck left sitting on the off-ramp at Harbor Blvd.in Costa Mesa. We consoled ourselves with In N Out while we waited for the tow truck - it was right next to the exit. The guy gave us a tow to the dealership, and we dropped it off. They told us the next day it had thrown a rod and would likely need a rebuild or new engine. Today we got the cost. So much for our tax refund, which I had been planning to put toward some things in my dad's estate.

Cripes. do they send out the the self-destruct signal along with your pink slip? Talk about planned obsolescence.

Something I meant to document from awhile ago - the fourth of July as a matter of fact.  But as the profile says, events may not occur in chronological order. Winter holidays just past so you get something from a warm summer one.

( crowds and a single visitor... )

Happy New Year 2013 by *senoritafish on deviantART

I'm sorry, I am late with everything for this year. Seems like I spend most of my time on my Nook, which will not let me copy/pasta anything, and it's kind of pain to type longer entries on. But in any case I think I'm allowed to say Happy New Year all of January, right?

I did the shark a while ago - you've probably seen it before, but finally kicked the kid's off the family laptop long enough to make the background New Year's Day. Gimp comes with kinda crappy fonts for text.

I wish everyone a far better and happier 2013 than 2012 was (and a good riddance to it). It's been rough for a lot of us, and I have to believe it can only get better.

Passed this on to miss_geek yesterday, but wanted to put it here as well...From The Oatmeal on being a web content creator...


Some Thoughts and Musings about Making Things for the Web

Not that I do this…but applicable to any creative endeavor, I think.  Except for the whole “making a living at it” aspect, because I would starve if that were the case.

"Inspiration is more like food poisoning; it spays out uncontrollably when you need it the least."

I don't consider myself a writer, but darned if ideas for things don't pop up when you have a deadline, or something else desperately needs doing (I often get an urge to do housework in those situations as well, except when I'm supposed to be doing housework).

I came across these the other day; I was thinking about doing some myself since I've been terrible at updating lately. The BlogHer network was having an alternative to NaNoWriMo, since I've been terrible about updating lately; National Blog Posting Month - the theme is Blogging For the Sake of Blogging and here's a list of prompts - never mind that I find them when November is half over with.