Curses, missed it again!

And this time by over two weeks.

March 13 was the fifth anniversary of this blog :)

For the benefit of those who aren't reading along on the Facebook side of things, all is well. My sister came for a visit last week, and I took the whole week off and yea we did have fun. We took the kids to the amusement park, did a puzzle, played a lot of cards and did a bunch of baking.

Then I had three days of work and now it's that most significant of Costa Rican holidays, Holy Week. Thursday and Friday are national holidays and we also have Monday off at my particular workplace, so now I have five days off to recover from my vacation last week :)

After that, though, it gets serious. Rather than a 4-day week following the Monday holiday, I have an 11-day one. There's a trade fair from April 8-11 and being A) The closest, B) The most bilingual and C) Happy to have the extra hours, I'll be covering the whole thing. The others will be in and out as well, but I'm on all four days.

So if you need me between now and Tuesday, I'll be sleeping in a lot, playing a lot of cards (Lisa reintroduced us to Hand & Foot, and kindly left her Rook deck when she left, so now we're playing both of those) and watching a lot of downloaded TV (currently Ballykissangel and WKRP, with episodes of The Big Bang Theory as they become available and Fawlty Towers for when we get tired of WKRP).

Oooh! Oooh! She posted!

Okay, I didn't expect it to be this long between posts, but there you have it. Facebook is really well suited to my online needs right now; I get to remark on the minutiae of my day and the issues of the day at will, and also keep up with many of my friends' goings on. And the commenting is much more interactive, and more of my friends are on there than ever read here.

That said, this is not an abandoned blog. I do expect to post here from time to time, especially when there are photos, because they're more accessible here than on Facebook. Well, kind of. Facebook is way better at providing access to all the photos, but the blog is available to anyone, even if they're not a Facebook friend.

ANYway.

What I came here to post was, my sister is in town and we discovered Ze Frank's Young Me / Now Me site, and we got Dad to scan some family scrapbooks, and here's ours:

Us in 1978


Us in 2010

Think he'll pick us for the book??

Prophetic, wasn't it?

No, reader in Rhode Island, it wasn't meant to be the finale of the whole blog.

In fact, it was the very day I mentioned to a friend that I really needed to keep posting every day, lest I stop posting altogether, that I decided to give myself permission not to post everyday.

And you see what happened.

It had gotten to the point where, more often than not, I was finding some random and trivial thing to post simply to keep up with the (self imposed) obligation of daily posting,when in fact I had nothing of substance (for even very generous definitions of "substance") to say, and the whole thing was really a chore.

So anyway.

I haven't abandoned it altogether, but I think it's clear that I'm over the Post Every Day Just For The Sake Of Doing So phenomenon.

Basically, I've switched over to Facebook for the day-to-day keeping in touch with people, remarking on the minutiae of life, and general online presence. It's not the same as blogging, but it's meeting the same needs. I'll post here if I have something more substantial to say, or photos to post.

Recycling is good

Remember this?

Where I'm From

I am from a Snoopy lunchbox,
a rickety cart with a tiny black and white TV,
waxed paper and Strawberry Quik.

I am from the red house on Bayside Avenue
the rambling parsonage on the hill
the splintery-sided duplex
white siding in the suburbs.
Loyal Smutley, orange Volvo, fresh cut grass
Grandpa praying for unwitting sinners in the Sunday leaves.

I am from the woods behind the house
woodchucks, rat snakes, box turtles,
the allure of touch-me-nots--but only the fat ones pop.

I am from "not before six o'clock" on Christmas morning,
Saturday special breakfast,
From Earl and Louise and the far-off Moores.

I am from towering stacks of library books in crinkly plastic
and from moving boxes never unpacked.

From the marriage of "one right way" to "shades of gray."

I am from Sunday School, peace rallies,
boxes sent to a Mississippi family,
rice and tea like the children in Cambodia.

I'm from Tunkhannock, the Dutch rub,
brownies and maple walnut ice cream.

From great grandfathers black with coal dust,
a great aunt (or cousin once removed?) in France,
Nicholson File, Lincoln Bank.

I am from thick, crumbling sepia photographs:
Is that Grandma? Who's he?
Did they really take a picture of her after she died?

I am from jumpy, faded, silent home movies:
Mom in polyester and cat-eye glasses
Dad in shorts and knee socks, trips I never knew I took.

I am from a scrapbook for each child and another for the whole family:
Combing through childhood photos to recall
that couch, those shorts, don't you still have that teddy bear?

Scrapbook photos of a family reunion 30 years back, long-lost cousins.
Digital photos of another family reunion, cousins found.

The original post is from June 2006 (wow, I was blogging in 2006??), and can be found here, with explanations and links to the source material, and Mom & Lisa's versions in comments.

This came up today because Dad read me a (partial) version that he's been working on, and which he is welcome to post in comments here.

Funny, it only feels like 1492

This is the 1500th post on this here blog, how about that.

So, as I was saying last night, Bob needs to leave the country to reset his visa before the regulations change, and as it turns out, some friends of ours happened to be planning a trip to Nicaragua at just about the right time. Couple that with Christmas money for just about the right amount, and we get to go here the week after next.

I'm just as glad to have company the first time we do this little excursion (which we'll need to do - or Bob will - either every three or every six months from now on, depending on how exactly the regulations change). The fact that we get to go with good friends (and some others we don't know yet), and stay at what looks like a really nice hotel, with tours and everything...well, I can make my peace with that too :)

I've been to Nicaragua many times, but I haven't been back for years, and I've never been there as a tourist. This looks like an entirely different side of the country than I used to see 15 and 20 years ago, traveling with students and talking to people about politics and the war.

Well, that was anticlimactic

I have posted at least once every single day since ... well, I'll go back and look it up eventually, but it was sometime before November 2007, and it was officially so as of January 4, 2008.

But, no more.

We had a really really stay-in day yesteryday; I made grandma's apple crisp for a mid-morning snack, and oven fries for part of our dinner, we watched two movies and played lots and LOTS of computer games (the girls have discovered The Sims), and I finished Julia's bag. Well, almost finished (photos forthcoming).

Since the girls are on vacation, their bedtime is more flexible, and I didn't get Julia settled till after 9:00 pm, and then it was 9:30, and then it was just too late to run out to the Internet café. So I didn't.

Oh well, lots of changes going on in life, I guess this is one of them. I'll probably still keep blogging daily, but the angst over missing one no longer seems to be an issue.

For the record, there is a pay-as-you-go dialup option and I made a couple of attempts to figure that out, but it was a little too elusive for my 10:00 pm brain to deal with. Plus, well, you know. Dialup.

Time of the season

Lacking any particular point to make this evening, I looked back at our blogs from a year ago.

There was a lot going on, this time last year.

Happy Birthday Steve!

Happy birthday to one of the best people on the whole Internet. Someday I'll make you a real cake, but for now you get another virtual one.


(With thanks and/or apologies to the maker of the original cake)

Two years ago today

History was made, and I had a hand in it. Happy blogday, Steve.

Little Bang Theory

Do yourself a favor and stop by my friend Ralph's to enjoy his fabulous photography and excellent writing.

And wish him a happy birthday while you're at it :)

It's educational!

Steve buzzed me this evening to ask Bob and me to help another blogger out by filling out a simple online survey to help her kids' 3/4th grade class can learn about other communities, both in the United States and around the world. I did it, and I know they'd love to hear from any of you as well :)

Also, you know what's cool? Watching kids learn new concepts. I was playing cards with Julia this evening and she was keeping score. She generally adds up the points on the cards by counting the hearts or clubs or whatever on each card. But when it was time to add one hand's score to the running total, she couldn't do that. 29 + 13. She wrote the equation:

29
13
--

She thought about it, and was obviously starting from the left. I don't know if this is how they are learning to do it in school, or whether it's simply her instinct based on reading. So, she came up with "thirty-twelve" - now, she knows that's not actually a number, so she was really surprised when I told her she was right. She thought about it a little longer and determined that "thirty-twelve" is more commonly known as "forty-two."

Later on, she did the same thing again, getting "seventy-leven" for 58+23, and then parsing it to 81.

Happy Birthday...

...to Ken (the very bravest of Sir Robins) and Christina, both of whom had the eminent good sense to be born.

And what better way to celebrate than with a pedantic argument about coconut migration? It's, umm, tropical!



Happy birthday, y'all. Hope you like the Python. (You have no idea how close you were to getting Norah Jones singing to Elmo about the letter Y.)

Recent Commentses

There.

Now I've added the new comments widget. Over on the sidebar, just below the Followers thingy, you can now see the five most recent comments.

Be still your heart.

Miscellanae

Hmmm.

I sat down to post something and the Internet slowed all down. Since what I was trying to post was that I was going to install a new comments widget on the blog--and now the widget thingy won't load--I ... guess I won't be posting about that.

What else is there?

It rained today, and there was supposedly a bit of an earth tremor in the wee hours of...what was it, Tuesday or so? Changing seasons, ahoy.

It's official; Bob's been here forever now.

He makes a damn fine tuna casserole, so I figure we'll keep him around.

I didn't actually tell him he had to post something, by the way.

I called someone "the ebola virus of the Internet" today. It went over very well.

Harry Potter movies are so long you have to really plan your evening to both watch them and get enough sleep. And on that note...

Blog note?

I have reports from the field that at least one copy of IE is going intermittently nutz and loading multiple copies of this blog, along with another page, and hanging along the way. Any corroboration, especially from those who may have updated their IE today?

Oh good grief

I guess it's a good thing I went ahead and did the redesign back on the first of the month and didn't save it for my own blog's anniversary.*

What with completely missing it and all.

/Eyeroll/

Hey, everybody, I've been blogging for four years and two days. Yay me!



* As always, the two random posts from the year 2000 were pre-dated once upon a time when I thought I would go back and fill in some stories by drawing on old emails. They were created after the fact, and I actually started blogging on March 13, 2005.

I knew it would get better

Considering a new look for the place.

Thoughts?

(This post only partially influenced by the nasty smell of the reheating lunch of a coworker who is observing lent. There needs to be a rule about microwaving fish in an office.)

I'm so derivative

So, after watching Bob struggle with redoing his own template half the day--actually, half the weekend--I decided to just poke around a little in the template options, just to see what sort of direction I might, hypothetically go in, if I were to eventually decide to redo my own format for my own blog's anniversary (coming up in 13 days, TYVM).

And, well. You can see where that led.

This is actually the same template he used, although we've hammered it into such different directions, that fact is pretty well lost in the mists of...uh, Blogger or something.

Anyway. Watch your step, some of the paint's still fresh and I'll be fixing that and that and oh-ho yes, that too, over the next few days.

Upheaval

It's just everywhere
A lot of it for the best
Some of it jarring

Tag-teamed, dagnabbit

I'm not real good about playing along with the memes. Sure, I'll pick one up when it serves me, but I frequently don't respond to tags, and have been known to ignore even the award-y type things.

But, I have had a very quiet day and the one thing I kind of thought about posting was a nice little story about a psychic, but it's not mine to tell.

So with both Steve (Pidomon's Posts) and Gine (Not at ALL What You Thought) on about this award-y thing, I guess I'll go ahead and play.


Says here, there's rules:

• Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends. (Yeah, well. We'll see about that.)
  
• Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award. (Done did that.)
  
• Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to This Post, which explains The Award. (Yup.)
  
• Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List. That way, we'll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives This Prestigious Honor! (Sure, wev.)
  
• Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog. (I hate that part. Why is it always a list of rules?)

Hmmm. Not sure why I sound so grouchy about it. I'm not, really! But I'm also not tagging anybody. If I read your blog (and in some cases where I haven't been back for a while), I already think you're superior :)