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Comments at this time

I have been playing the sims the last few days. Before that, I was cleaning like crazy. It was weird. Anyway, the sims… last night when I went to bed, my eyes were a bit stingy and I think I’ve suffered permanent nerve damage in my tailbone. But that’s what it’s like with the sims, I don’t play for a long time, but when I do I play a lot and for several days.

Anyway, I have a question that’s long been on my mind. It’s about blog comments. It’s two questions I want to ask you really.

1. If you are a blogger, how do you handle your comments? Do you reply directly to people by email? Do you respond in the comments section of your own blog? Do you even reply at all?

2. If you are a commenter on many blogs, how do you like your comments handled? Do you like them to be acknowledged in the comments section? Do you go back and check for responses? Do like to get emails if you comment warrants a response?

I ask because I go back and forth. As a commenter, I don’t always go back to a post to see if my comments are acknowledged, I read too many blogs. Many blogs have “Subscribe to this post” features and I really like that. It allows me to get email follow up comments on any posts on which I comment, if I so choose. Some people get soooo many comments, I don’t really want an email follow up for each one. I like the conversational tone of acknowledging comments in the comments section, and I like the idea that other people can see your response. In the past, this is how I handled all comments.

On the other hand, there are blogs that acknowledge my comments with emails and I really like that too. I’ve gotten to know certain bloggers better, simply because of an established email relationship. I tend to do that a bit more now, email responses to commenters. I always try to send an email response to a new commenter no matter what, just to say “hi!” But I miss the conversational tone my comments used to have back in the day.

So its a quandary to me, how to handle comments. I was curious what you guys thought, what you prefer.

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Uncategorized

Pants

In the last couple of months I have lost more weight. Not by any effort on my part. I shouldn’t mention that part because I know how hard it is to lose weight, how much work it takes. Saying that I went down a pant size with no effort is going to make people want to slap me. I would want to slap me. In fact, hang on, I’ll do it for you. Consider me slapped.

During those darker early months of 2008, I lost my appetite for a while, and I couldn’t make myself eat anything. After I got my appetite back, I waited to see if I put the weight back on when I started to eat, but it’s been a couple months and all my pants are still too big. So, I need new pants. You’d think having Too Big pants would be plenty comfortable. But it’s not. I have to wear a belt to keep them up, which is pinchy. And they make me feel, well, dumpy in the seat.

There was a fatter time in my life when I thought I might learn to enjoy shopping, when I could shop in any store I wanted. But you know what? I still hate it. I am a creature of habit. If I find a shirt I like, I buy more of them in different colors. I used to wear the same type of Levi’s, I had several pair, never bothered with anything else because they fit and were comfortable. Losing weight forced me to try new paints, but I still gravitate to the same stores over and over. Gap, Old Navy, American Eagle Outfitters and whomever sells Levi’s.

Imagine my despair to find that my style of American Eagle Outfitter’s jeans seem to be discontinued, the remaining stock all the wrong size. The biggest problem is that I actually got compliments wearing those jeans. If someone compliments in a pair of jeans? Well, I immediately go out and buy more of them. I don’t think anyone has every complimented my jeans before, come to think of it. So that was a Big Deal.

The Gap didn’t have anything I wanted in the proper length. I don’t even understand what Old Navy has done to their jeans, and everything in the Levi’s store is all fancy and skinny legged. Or sooper flared. Obviously I’m not a fashion plate.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking “Shut up, Jodi! You have to buy pants in a SMALLER SIZE! Boo-hoo!”

You’re right. I’m shutting up.

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Amelia, photo

Amelia’s new clothes

You might be wondering where exactly Amelia has been lately. Why she’s been so quiet. For a long time I have wanted to get her framed. She’s been through a lot and has a lot of wear and tear. I wanted to get her in a frame before anymore damage occurred. She is, technically, a collector’s item.

Last December, before Christmas, I took her into Michael’s, along with the Jim Henson/ Kermit Think Different poster and two NaNoWriMo posters, to be framed. They were having a 50% off sale, and I wanted something nice. And oh man were they helpful. We probably spent about an hour and half, choosing matting and frames. The NaNo posters were especially difficult, colorwise. It took 3 frame dept people to figure it out, with much debate. Finally, we had everything spec’d out and he started to write up the estimate. That is something he maybe should have done after the first poster, I could have saved us all a lot of time. The Think Different posters are 24 x 36, the NaNo posters 18 x 24, and really, that is quite large for a custom frame job. Each poster had a relatively inexpensive frame, but three levels of matting. It was so nice.It really made a difference.

When he added up the total for just Amelia, I almost passed out. I was expecting it to be less than that at 100%. At 50% it was ridunculously expensive. Let me put it this way, I could have framed all prints as planned, or I could have bought my husband a black MacBook with an extra gig of ram for Christmas with that kind of money. If I had that kind of money lying about. Which I did not.

I decided to go ahead and have Amelia framed. We tried reducing the cost by removing some of the matting, but it just looked so much better the way we planned it out. It hurt me to pay that much, believe me. It was extortion. I don’t even have Jim and Kermit on the wall because I couldn’t bare to have them look all naked and plain next to Amelia.

The picture does not do it justice. She really does look fabulous.

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Amelia: Hey.. look at me!

Me: You look good.

Amelia: I look FANTASTIC. My posture has never been better. Can you hear me from behind the glass?

Me: Loud and clear.

Amelia: Sweet. Do you think you can wipe off that fingerprint in the lower right corner? I don’t want to look smudgy.

Me: I’m on it.

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music

wet.

There more than a few issues I have with my apartment. I wish it had an electrical outlet in the bathroom. (I’ve never had a bathroom with no electrical outlets.) I wish it had a dishwasher and a garbage disposal. (Haven’t been without those since my apartment in Ballard.)

But one of my favorite things about it is the building-wide water heater. In my mind, it’s behemoth. The entire building shares it. This means that we rarely run out of hot water. We can take showers as long as we want, and still have hot water. You can stand under a hot pounding stream of water for however long it takes to beat the sore outta your muscles. Or you can sit on floor of the shower and contemplate your life, with water cascades down on you like unusually warm rain.

If you want to know my mood the last couple of days, just go listen to Neko Case’s Blacklisted album.

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Neko Case – Outro With Bees

In the meantime, let’s hover like bees.

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photo, tshirts

What’s on Jodi’s t-shirt today?

Again. Because my Photo Booth is working, I guess.

Photo 49

I got this t-shirt at the Northern Voice blogging conference last month, which was pretty fun. I finally met Airdre in person, after reading her blog for a long time and I met a completely new person named Catherine, who gets to play WoW at her job. On purpose! We are going to meet for coffee someday.

Airdre has a podcast called Lipgloss and Laptops, and consequently gets lots of free product. Last week when we met for drinks, she brought me a bag full of MAC products. It was like Christmas! Anyway, if you like beauty products, you should give it a listen.

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Photobooth fails to recognize external iSight camera after installing Leopard.

I rarely complain when something goes wrong with my mac. Maybe because it’s rare for something to go wrong. Or maybe it’s because I can figure it rather quickly, so there is no time for a rant. But ever since installing Leopard, I have not been able to use my external iSight camera in Photobooth. It would not recognize it. Just gave me a black background with a “Camera Off”message. Since I can use it for iChat and for the webcam, I knew this was not the case.

Sometimes I could make it work by restarting my mac. About 50% of the time. However, if I closed the application, it would not work when I re-launched. It was frustrating and it’s been going on for months. Could not figure it out.

In researching an application that would allow me to color correct from within aps that use the iSight, I discovered iGlasses. It is only $9.95 and actually does other things I wanted, like rotate the image, for one. So I bought it, installed it and BLAMMO, now Photobooth works every time.

Go figure. I don’t know why, and you shouldn’t have to buy something to make it work. However, I’m just putting it up here so if anyone else is doing a search on the same problem, they might come across this and see how I fixed it. It was supremely annoying. I even wrote a complete and proper issue statement for my blog title. Hee!

Photo 51

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