Sun 24 Feb 2008
Easy Like Sunday: Solid Colors
A red sweatshirt; a green pillow, and a blue fleece blanket with a black cat on it, happily kneading…
Fri 22 Feb 2008
Message in a Bottle (A Mimi Meme)
From all the way at the other end of the Keystone State, I was tagged by Peg for this meme, which began with Mimi.
Message In A Bottle Meme
What message would you like to send out to the universe?
You are about to send a virtual Message In a Bottle across the Blog Ocean.
Leave a message in the sand or on the bottle.
Write anything you wish.
Be a pirate or a poet. Serious or silly. Anonymous or not.
Here are the rules:
1. Compose a message to place in your virtual bottle
2. Right click and save the graphic at Mimi Writes.
3. Use a graphics program of your choice to place the message on the picture
4. Post the meme and these rules on your blog
5. Tag a minimum of 5 bloggers - or your entire blogroll - to do the same. Notify them of the tag.
Your virtual bottle will remain afloat in the blogosphere ocean for all blogernity (That’s a Mimism for blog + eternity.) - don´t forget to leave your link at Mimi´s Home to be added to the master list.
Now tagging some people (and other life forms) who should be able to come up with a good one:
Traditional Friday Cat Blogging: Two Times Caitie
This picture looks to me as though the photographer said, “OK, Caitie, go over there, stand in front of the car, and strike a pose.”
FWIW, I couldn’t decide between the closeup and the shot that included the Midnite Cruiser, so they’re both up.
Thu 21 Feb 2008
Thursday Thirteen #13: Confessions
The local newspaper is one of the few that has carried the comic strip Peanuts since the very beginning in 1950. Even after the death of creator Charles Schulz in 2000, the paper has continued to publish daily and Sunday strips from the syndicate. The Sunday strips are from 1961, and even though the everyday situations and the humor aren’t out of date, the props Schulz drew — like the wood-cabinet televisions — remind you that you’re reading and enjoying a strip that was drawn 47 years ago.
Schulz licensed Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and the rest of his characters for commercials and made millions of dollars. He wasn’t the first to have his cartoons sell products; among his predecessors, Percy Crosby did the same with his creation, Skippy.
At the site devoted to Skippy and Crosby is an ad Crosby himself did for Libby’s tomato juice, and it included his answers to a game called Confessions. I can’t find a trace of that game anywhere today, but I’ll take those questions (and add another to make 13) and answer them some 70 years after they appeared in the ad.
- My best virtue: patience when patience is needed
- My worst fault: patience when action is needed
- The virtue I admire most in women: trustworthiness
- The virtue I admire most in men: trustworthiness
- My favorite actress: Judi Dench
- My chief hobby: Blogging is fun, but I could give up blogging a lot easier than sim league baseball.
- My favorite song: Just one? These days, I’m humming this one an awful lot…
- My favorite book: Ball Four has meant the most.
- My pet vanity: I’m casual almost everywhere else, but I won’t wear jeans to Borgata.
- My favorite food: Pizza… there was a little place in New Jersey that made the best I ever had. Gone, but not forgotten.
- My favorite drink (hard): Yuengling Lager reminds me of beer I had in Austria. Goes down like water if I’m not careful.
- My favorite food drink: Chocolate milk (you were expecting maybe tomato juice?)
- My favorite snack: Milk chocolate covered almonds… sure, a moment on the lips, forever on the hips (or in my case, the belly), but ah, what a moment it is…
Wed 20 Feb 2008
Good Things: A safe place to hide
If his human mama Pat were threatened, Nicky would fight, kick, bite, scratch; anything he could to help her. Yet, he knows instinctively that when he himself feels threatened, a cat needs to understand what he’s fighting before coming out of his corner.
That squealing off in the distance yesterday afternoon — I could have told him it was only the brakes of a truck on the road nearby, but since he trusts only his own instincts, he dashed under a bush and peered out to see for himself.
Mon 18 Feb 2008
A Rainy Day and a Monday…
…but that didn’t bring me down, because it felt a lot like spring today in this part of the country. Even though the rain stopped by noon, at first only Caitie and Kelly went outside when I opened the door. Nicky went out a few minutes later, and I got a few photos of all 3 of them that looked promising on the small video screen. I’ll download them to the PC tonight after work.
While I’m thinking of it, I have taken a boatload of photographs since we got a digital camera in April 2005. As the number has grown into the thousands, organizing them has become more difficult. At first I liked the organizer in Photoshop Elements 5, until the database got slower as it got larger. I mean, by the end it took about 90 seconds to load the program, and minute-long waits to call up the organizer.
That led to some searching for a freeware replacement, and for a day or so I used XnView, but then I read on Ed Bott’s blog that he recommends the new Windows Live Photo Gallery. I installed it, and can second his assertion. Now our photos are nicely organized, and the program itself is more intuitive than anything else I tried. (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Picasa.)
The WLPG also has a screen saver function, and I’ll confess that Pat and I spent several minutes in front of the PC watching it yesterday afternoon. We’d gone up there intending to do some work, but neither of us wanted to move the mouse and stop the random parade of photographs… there are all of us in front of the main building at Hershey Park… and there’s one from the day of Diana’s christening… oh, there’s a good one of Lizzie… nice shot of Sandusky Bay from our vacation 2 years ago… there’s Diana in her yellow Easter dress, so cute… that one of Kelly came out pretty well… and on, and on…
