Category Archives: blogging

blogging, Cooking and food, William, work

Must have meat.

The hiatus was unintentional. I have reasons. Maybe we’ll discuss them later. And I feel extremely rusty now. I think I will baby step back.

1. The old lady in front of me at the store today smelled of beans and franks. Also, I’m pretty sure there was a guy in bulk foods who had recently pooped his pants. I have the nose of a dog.

2. Does anyone have a really good lasagna recipe? I want to learn to make lasagna. Feel free to share. Must have meat.

3. I didn’t mention this earlier, but Wil was laid off at the end of January. We knew it was coming. He’s looking for a job. Please give him one if you have one free. Must be fun and pay lots of money.

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blogging, Cooking and food

A subject more universally understood than World of Warcraft

I do love english muffins. One, because they call themselves “muffins” even though they are not part of what I would, traditionally, consider the muffin family. Cheeky. And, they make the sublime Egg McMuffin possible. (You want to blow your own mind? Make your own egg mcmuffin at home. With cheddar cheese. Good god, that is good eating.)

What I like best of all is the way the english muffin encourages my excesses. No sooner do you touch your knife to the muffin, then the butter disappears into deep crevices. And you have to get MORE BUTTER. More butter = more better, that’s just a fundamental truth. Everyone knows that.

Thank you, english muffin! Welcome to my tummy.

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blogging

Delurking Day 2009

Chris says it’s Delurking Day and I believe him.

So drop a comment if you lurk, and say “hi!” And if you lurk, but have your own blog, add the link so I can come over to your house and say “hi!” back. And then we’ll be friends! Won’t that be lovely.

If you don’t lurk, you should still say “Hi!” because I live a pretty sheltered life.

Delurking2009 Copy

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blogging, Canada, evildeb, William

Measure my booty.

The Greater Vancouver Region has a very strong Blogging/ Social Media community, which is great. I didn’t know of such a community in Seattle. In fact, I never knew any other bloggers in Seattle, sadly. I’m listed on a uberlist of bloggers in Seattle*, that’s as close as I came to knowing other bloggers. So even though I considered myself a Seattle blogger, of course, I have never really considered myself a Community Blogger. I blog about myself. So I’m very impressed with the community here in the GVR.

The other day, I was mentioning to Wil that our friends, Airdre and Kerry Anne, won Favorite Audio/ Video Podcast for their excellent beauty podcast, Lipgloss and Laptops, in the Best of 604. Very well deserved. He asked me why I didn’t win an award. Which is sweet, don’t you think? In addition to not really being heavily involved of this community, it’s quite simple. This is not my blog’s heyday.

Oh, it’s true. I know it. You may or may not know it. Blogs, like everything, have and ebb and flow. I think that once I quit my job, my blog started to ebb. Or maybe it’s flowing. I’m not sure. Either one. Man, you should have caught me sometime in 2004 or 2005. I was rocking the blogging.

I’m ok with this. It’s understandable really. If my life were one of those Family Circus cartoons, where they show what Billy or Jeffy did all day, everywhere they went, it would show little Jodi footprints running from my apartment, to the Safeway half a block away. And back. Occasionally, you’d see little feet running further down the block to the bank or London Drugs. But your chances of blog fodder decrease greatly if you never leave a 3 block radius.

Nonetheless, I did recently win two nice awards. One from Captain Dumbass of Us and Them, who lives here in the Greater Vancouver Region.

Booty

Hee! He said “booty.” One day, Captian Dumbass and I will run into each other when we are both wearing our Bad Monkey shirts. I certainly hope we aren’t compelled to fling poo.

And another from a former coworker, although I didn’t know him at the time, Good Father.

Measures Up

It’s too bad he wasn’t blogging back in the days when I was at my POE. (And we didn’t know each other) We could have had Blogging Lunches. Booked a conference room on the 2nd floor, right next to Central Services, with it’s free soda and candy jar. Remember that kid, the mail guy, who one time dyed those kick ass flames into his hair? His name escapes me, because I’m horrible with names. It starts with a “D.” He’s worked there about 20 years by now, I figure. I hope he’s still there. And the last big formal Christmas party we had, right before the dot com bust? We had different international themed rooms for the dinners. Oh man, I got DErunk that year. I did it for Evildeb. She was pregnant with AlmostCertainlyGoingToEndUpEvilMaggie, and was sad she could not “party.”

Anyhoo, I like these awards. They are übercomments from two readers saying “I like you. Or at least your blog.” And that’s all the reward I really need. ** I know that one day my blog will cease to ebb and start to flow again.

* I suppose I should remove myself, but I’m not gonna. I still consider myself a Seattle blogger. I’m just… North of Seattle, is all. Very very north.

** ok, I suppose all awards are really saying that.

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blogging

Blogiversary: Now we are 6

Happy Blog Anniversary to me! It’s been six years now. Every time this date comes around, I have to stop and think how much life has changed. How much blogging has changed. One thing remains the same, I still use Movable Type. [yes, that was for you, Raul. :)]
It was my original plan to have a new design ready for the 27th, but my inability to settle on a particular design has made that difficult. I stress about it late at night when I am trying to sleep, how much I suck. And then I remember, no one is the boss of me. I can do what I want. And I laugh the laugh of the lazy and the procrastinators. Quietly, tho, as to not wake up Wil.
Tell the truth, I think one of the biggest impediments blogging, for me, is Twitter. It’s made me lazy. The mundane events that I used to expound upon for blog posts, now, more often than not, end up in tiny little tweets. I mean, the other day a baby bird pooped on my head, while I was out shopping with Evildeb. In the past, I could have milked that for a good three paragraphs. Now I send out a tweet. I have mixed feelings about that. I enjoy Twitter, and I’ve actually made friends through it, which is awesome. However, I don’t like what it’s done to me as a writer. I’ve been stepping away from it the last few days, trying to let go of my need to compulsively read every single tweet that came since I last checked.
So… anyway.. yeah, a bird pooped on my head. A baby bird. I think that’s lucky. And gross.
Thank you for six years of blogging fun!

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blogging, books, movies and tv

Business Matters

I apologize, I’ve been more interested in working on my new blog design, then actually blogging. And I wish I could say that I’ve been working on it diligently. I was. But then I decided I needed to watch all three seasons of Veronica Mars again. It happens. At least we’ve had a run through all seasons of Buffy and Angel in the last year. And House. And BSG.

The fact is, I’ve changed my design three times since I’ve started. And while I’ve been spending most of my time on content and layout within MT4, I at least have to have a banner done, to keep in mind while I work. So I am now working on my third banner with built in roll over buttons. It’s so sad how much I have forgotten about Photoshop and Illustrator and such since I left my job. I used to be able to make a roll over button in my sleep. Well, just before I went to sleep maybe. Now I have to LOOK IT UP!.

Guh.

I am updating my reading list over on the new design, I used to be really good at keeping track of my books. So I am working towards that again. I have also joined Good Reads, just haven’t bothered to add a button or link in the old design. Because I’m all about moving forward, baby. Anyhoo, be my book buddy if you are on Good Reads, won’t you please?

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blogging, Canada

Vancouver and WordPress sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G

Today, I had a major breakthrough regarding my understanding of THE WAYS THINGS WORK with Movable Type 4. Finally. I was so elated that I not only sent a tweet out about it, I had to bug Wil at work about it as well. That’s just the best feeling, isn’t it? Figuring something out. There is a huge lightbulb over my head right now.

So, there is a large and active blogging community, here in Vancouver. If a community existed, like this, in Seattle, I did not know about it. Which is a shame. I “met” some of them at Northern Voice: 2008. And by met, I mean I saw their name tags or heard them speak. I only met two people: Airdre whom I’d know from her blog, and Catherine.. But I added a lot of the people I saw to my RSS feeds. And I’ve gotten to know few more bloggers by association.

So, as an outsider looking in to that community, I can tell you – Vancouver area bloggers LOVE the WordPress. They hold regular gatherings they call WordCamps. This is awesome. Raul, who follows me on Twitter and comments on my blog, is speaking at the upcoming WordCamp on the 16th. He’s watched the regular tweets of despair I have sent out, while struggling with MT4. And he, like a few others, are of the opinion that I should consider moving over to WordPress. And I’ve thought about me. But… you know how I feel about it. I’m a Movable Type girl.

Raul has challenged me to come to the next WordCamp, and if I don’t switch over to WP, he will buy me a coffee. I might do it. But he’ll need to buy me a Dr Pepper, because I don’t drink coffee. I don’t think it will make me switch. I am extremely stubborn and can be quite tenacious about things. And I’ve set my mind to figuring out MT4. I wonder if he gets a free toaster for every convert he brings over to the WP side? Do you think they are going to be testimonials? I’m not worried, the Southern Baptists didn’t git me in Oklahoma, WP won’t git me here.

I kid. I’m jealous, actually. I ask you, are there no other Movable Type bloggers in Vancouver? Where is our clubhouse? Why don’t we have t-shirts and secret handshakes?

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blogging

Sometimes the Constitution is just one giant headache.

This is very funny to me. Of course, that could be because I am not a Republican. And, I’m not so stupid as to believe everything is this black and white and all Republicans are evil, so don’t bother trying to engage me in a political debate.

Obviously, these last few posts are lame attempts to “blog” without actually putting any work into it. Shame on me. I will try to have some fresh, wordy content for Monday. I’m attempting to restore some kind of structure in my life.

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blogging

Finishing my thought

Yesterday, I made a little footnote asterisk. I do that because sometimes a word or sentence will make me want to lose track. Go off on a tangent. However, I failed to complete my little thought down below. I feel …. incomplete. So here, a day later, is the oh so important digression.

I can’t always remember when something happened, and I often look it up on my blog.*

*Without my blog, and chat transcripts, I would have been unable to answer a lot of the Sponsor Relationship Questionnaire for Immigration, in fact.

Well, that hardly seemed worth it a day later.

Man, all you guys are seriously trying to make me switch to WordPress, aren’t you? Maybe it’s time to test it out again. Maybe.

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blogging

Me and MovableType 4.x

Several weeks ago, I upgraded my version of MovableType to 4.1something. And, once I finally figured out how to edit some config file properly, it’s been fine. Except for searches. The search field on my blog no longer works. And believe it or not, this is important to me. I can’t always remember when something happened, and I often look it up on my blog.*

There is usually something, with each release, which prompts me to redo my style sheets according to whatever new crazy format they use at the time. It can take a while, but I can usually figure it out, and I end up feeling pretty smart about the whole thing as well. But with 4.x everything is different. It’s not just the style sheets, it’s the whole new template structure. It’s simply beyond my ken. I’m not geek enough to figure out how to move all my content over into the new structure, and change the style sheet to look like I want it to, with my newly mocked out design.

It’s gotten to the point where I warn Wil I am going to work on it, and he knows not to worry when I start yelling “What the FUCK? Where did all the sidebars go? I CHANGED NOTHING! For fuck’s sake!” It makes me so crabby.

On the one hand, I really really want to figure it out. I will feel so shiny and brilliant if I can. Not to mention, I truly do love MovableType, and Six Apart products as well. One only has to look at the Vox blogging system to realize how adorable blogging can be, thanks to these guys. Not to mention TypePad. They are just cool. I’d be all over TypePad, but I don’t need a hosted service.

I’ve been using MT since I started blogging almost six years ago. I like it. I don’t want to leave it.

But for pity’s sake, it’s going to make me crazy. Almost every blogger I’ve met, or that I read, who lives here in the Vancouver area uses WordPress. So much so I figured it had to be made here, but I guess it’s just gotten really popular in the last couple of years. I’ve thought about it. It appears I would have to install a copy for each blog I want to have, and I’m not sure I like that idea. But it’s tempting to know that there are more resources available to me out there for help with WordPress.

I’m going to keep plugging away at it. For now.

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