Color Your World: Red Violet

Here’s my entry for Jennifer’s Color Your World Challenge: Red Violet. I’m not sure this is a very good match, but it’s the best I could find in my stash (most of my photos are on my other computer which is still in the shop).

It’s a close up of a daylily. 🙂

More Computers

I know it must seem like I don’t do much but bitch about my computer, but it’s incredibly frustrating!

This morning I’ve already spent over 3 hours trying to complete a job that should take no more than 10 minutes!

My regular computer is in the shop. I was supposed to get it back 2 days ago. Yesterday they told me it wouldn’t be ready til (at least) Monday. That one does work slightly better than this one.

Since I can’t find any work offshore, pretty much everything I need to do is online. Look for a job, edit my photographs, upload photographs, write, research articles, research where and how to query articles, etc.

I’m so pissed off right now I feel like smashing the computer with the biggest hammer I can find!

Color Your World: Red-Orange

Here’s my entry for Jennifer’s Color Your World Challenge: Red-Orange.

I took this picture back in August. I had gone to Costa Rico for a blogging workshop. I spent a few extra weeks traveling around down there. This picture was taken in Nicaragua. Near San Juan del Sur. During the Arribada, where the sea turtles drag themselves up the beaches to lay their eggs. I highly recommend it. 🙂

Dance- Bali

Here’s another post for the Daily Post’s Weekly Photography Challenge (Dance).

I took this photo a couple of years ago in Ubud. I was on vacation in Bali (Indonesia) and spent a couple of weeks checking out the beautiful island. The people are so friendly and the island itself is gorgeous. It’s small, so easy to get around. There are volcanoes to hike, whitewater rivers to raft, perfect waves for surfing, great wrecks for SCUBA diving, and the art scene is fantastic!

I was told that it’s part of their religion there on Bali to make something more beautiful every day. I saw that they really took that to heart. Their temples are amazing, and the people practice music and dance to perform in the temple ceremonies. They have entire villages where the people just make one type of art: stone cutters, woodcarvers, painters, silversmiths, batik, etc. You could spend months there finding something new every day. 🙂

Donna The Buffalo: Positive Friction

Just for the hell of it. Here’s some good music from Donna the Buffalo. Another of my favorites. 🙂

Computers

My regular computer is in the shop. Still!

I have all my pictures on there and also my photo editing software. I haven’t been able to do any work on my photos because of that. I have thousands and thousands of photos on that computer and at least a few hundred of them have already been edited.

It’s a lot of work to fix them up the way I’d like them to look (and I don’t really do much to them). I was so upset when those hackers stole my photos and blackmailed me over them. I called the police and even the FBI. The police said they couldn’t help and the FBI wasn’t even nice enough to TRY- or to tell me that they just weren’t interested. I couldn’t figure out how to get the money to the bastards in time so I just had to get over losing almost my entire trip to Nicaragua. Thousands of fantastic photos- gone forever! 🙁

Thank god they only corrupted my thumb drive! If they had got everything on my computer  I think I would have done something really stupid like throw the computer against the wall and then light it on fire! How could someone NOT be frustrated and MAD AS HELL?

I was going to work on uploading to the internet this week since I’m still not working. I hope they’ll finish with my computer tomorrow!

I have a feeling it’s going to take me a while to get everything back in order. They had to put in a new (larger) hard drive and move everything over. I just hope everything is still THERE.

Busy Tuesdays

Tuesdays are always the busiest days of the week for me. Today was no exception. I woke up early (0430). I had to leave the house by 0530 to get to the training center on time. It’s all the way up in NW Houston, it takes me about an hour and a half if there’s traffic.

I spent the morning role playing for one of the training sessions. We have more and more of these required courses every year. This one was to assess how the trainee would handle emergency situations at work.

As a role player, I act the part of one of the bridge team. Today my job was to keep track of what was done as things progressed. I had to make note of the times certain things were done, for example: what time did the incident start, what time did they call for muster, was anybody missing, who, was help called, when, were the fire pumps started, etc.

It’s actually a pretty interesting ‘job’. I enjoy it. It will definitely help me when it’s my turn to take the class.

I stopped on the way home to get rid of some of my books at the Half Price Books store. Hard to believe, but they only offered me $6 for 9 (very good condition and great to read) books! I took 2 of them back after that. I’ll donate them to the library.

I got home in time to make a few phone calls (check to see if any news on the job that was supposed to start on March 4th, figure out why the pharmacy gave me the wrong prescription yesterday, call and message about another possible job). No satisfaction on any of them, I’ll have to try again tomorrow.

I went for my daily walk. The weather is still really nice and cool. I wish it lasted longer. We’re supposed to have another cold front come through tomorrow so it might last a few days more. 🙂

I checked out my plants. My lemon tree is blooming like crazy and is already making tiny little lemons. A bunch of them got blown off in the wind today. The lime tree didn’t have so much damage, but it’s right up next to the house. I’ve got 4-5 strawberries that look like they’ll be ready for picking in a few more days. I’ll have to keep a close eye out to get them before the birds do.

Came in and tried to check my email, in between the internet dropping off every few minutes. Nothing too important in the mail (nothing about work).

Off to the weekly Campaign for Liberty meeting for our usual political discussion. Last week we had a new guy show up. He had some interesting things to say. He sounded pretty hard core socialist to me, but we did agree on a lot of things (corporations have too much power, GMO labeling, fiat money, sky high debt levels). I have to admire him for sticking around for the entire meeting and holding his own when everybody else was on the opposite side on a lot of issues. Sorry to say, he didn’t come back tonight. 🙁

Too bad. We really need to work together to find a way to fix what’s wrong. We really all do agree on a lot of issues but it seems like we just can never focus on that. We always wind up fighting over the few little things we disagree on. We’ll never win the real fight if we can’t figure out that we should not be fighting each other, we need to concentrate on the real enemy.

We’re going to try again to get the word out about our weekly meetings and to inform people about some of the concerns we have. It’s hard. We’re still a very small group and everybody is always so busy. Nobody really has any time to concentrate on this stuff and we have a lot of things we’re involved in (community garden, radios, GMOs, etc).

I promised to make a Facebook page. I hope I can remember how to do that. 😉

I hope to heck I’ll be at work next Tuesday! If not, I’ll go to painting class instead of role playing, they don’t have anything else scheduled up there til April 11th. I hope I don’t have to wait that long to go to work again.

Friday Night

Is everybody out for Friday night? It’s awful quiet around here today! What’s everybody up to?

My good computer has been in the shop since Monday. I had to go and drop off programs to reload this afternoon. Hoped to have it back today, but nope. It will be Monday (I hope).

I took a ride down to the beach after I finished at the computer shop. It was dead down there too. It was really a beautiful day (a little warm), sunny and bright, but nobody was out enjoying it.

I came home early so as not to get busted crossing the bridge. I’m hoping to have a quiet night at home and catch up on sleep. 🙂

How to Write A Bucket List

I got an email today from Caz at ytravelblog.com. I’ve been following for a while. It’s a very interesting and inspiring blog. Her email today about how she wound up with free tickets to watch a surfing event she really wanted to see was pretty cool. Here’s what she had to say…

…It sounded so exotic and fun and I made the decision that is was something I was one day going to do.

It made my bucket list and I just put it away.

When we moved to Burleigh, I knew we’d be here when the Quiksilver Pro was on at Snapper Rocks – my favourite spot along the East Coast of Australia (sunsets here are magical).

Bucket list done. We made the decision to head down to the rocks and jostle for space among the crowds to watch. I was committed and fully immersed in the joy the ocean and surfing brings me.

Then, on Friday Woody, one of my best friends and part of our old surfie crowd – someone who I’ve checked off a lot of bucket list moments with, and who makes me laugh so much – phoned to say she had VIP tickets to the Quikky Pro and if I wanted to go with her!!

I train my Money Cleansers to not look at the world through the eyes of co-incidence, but magic and the miracle of possibilities. These tickets arrived on the day we happened to be in town, in between two trips away. The comp finished early so we wouldn’t have made it at all otherwise, even on the rocks.

And they came only a few days after I announced in this update sharing Kathmandu’s competition that if I could take one trip with a friend, I’d hike Maccu Piccu with Woody because travel has been at the core of our friendship, we laugh so much together, and afterwards there’d be many drinks to celebrate.

Well, we didn’t get Maccu Piccu, but we got front row seats high above the waves at my dream event. We got to see our two fave Aussie chick surfers (sadly the men were cancelled – No Kelly or Mick Fanning!), we had Coronas flowing all day, and we laughed and laughed and laughed. (Photos on Instagram)…

 

I think a lot of what she had to say makes sense. She says it works for her. It goes along with what my stepmother Irene always insisted on (and it worked for her too). When I would worry about all the things that could go wrong, she would tell me “don’t worry- the universe is in divine order.”

It definitely worked for her. She always did pretty much whatever she wanted. I remember she was so excited to go skydiving for her 70th birthday. 🙂

I’ve never made a formal bucket list. I have so many things I still want to do, the list would go on forever! Here are just a few of the things I would put on mine (if I had one). In no particular order…hike Mt Kilimanjaro, cruise to Antarctica, African safari, explore India, play piano well, play saxophone well, SCUBA dive Yap, sail around the world, volunteer with Cross Cultural Solutions, volunteer with Earthwatch, write a book, sing in a band, learn to play the fiddle, cruise the inland passage to Alaska, see the Northern lights, ski the Alps, sail the Barque Europa, sail the Picton Castle, learn to speak Spanish well, …, find a home base where I can live free! Get the idea? It’s really, reeeeaaally long!

Do you already have a bucket list? What’s on it? If you don’t have one already and want to make one, this is how to do it according to Caz…

  • Dream
  • Write it out
  • Commit to it
  • Immerse yourself in the joy and love of it
  • Take some sort of action
  • Let go of control
  • Allow for the miracle of possibilities

 

Hello

This song by Adele has been pretty popular for a while now. I like it, but I think this parody (SNL did one too) is pretty good. I like their sense of humor. Really silly. 😉

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who tried to help me figure out what’s going on with my subscribe/follow/like buttons.

I will follow up on some of your suggestions when I can and hopefully will find a solution soon. 🙂

Subscribing

I learned something today.

About my blog.

My blog has been screwed up since I moved it to this paid (or self hosted) website- Captainjillsjourneys.com. I really had no problems while I was blogging on the free wordpress site- captjillsjourneys.wordpress.com. The only issue there was that I couldn’t find any way to ‘monetize’ it.

I’m still trying to figure out how to do that, but since I’ve moved I’ve had to pretty much start over from scratch and have been slowly (VERY slowly) building up an audience here again.

For a while I thought I had lost ALL my online friends and followers, but after about 3 months I found some of them were still hanging around on my old site. Thanks for sticking it out guys!!

Today, I was talking to a friend (he’s one of my first followers) on the phone and asked him to see if he could subscribe to the new site (this one). NO, he could not! He tried a few times and could get nowhere. He tried ‘liking’ a post and could not do that either. He had no trouble commenting.

Since talking to him, I’ve gone through and re-checked all my settings on my dashboard. I don’t see anything that should prevent anyone from liking or following me here. I’ve got the same settings here as on the old blog which still has no problems.

I next went to my Mailchimp account which is one of the big reasons to move- so I own my mailing list instead of wordpress- and found out I only have 5 subscribers. WTF? Even on my dashboard here it shows me that I have about 600.

I thought before today that there was something screwy with the widget that has the ‘form’ where you can enter your email to follow me. Now I KNOW that there is something messed up between that widget and the Mailchimp email list.

I wish there was someone here local so we could just sit down together and go over all this. I’m sure if I could meet up with some computer geek, I could have this problem fixed without too much trouble.

Does anybody out there have any suggestions for me based on what I’ve just described? Or know anybody around Freeport TX that can help?

Moving Day

Class is over and they’ve already started picking up new students for next months class. I need to move out of this apartment I’ve been staying in all month.

I found a nice looking place downtown. I’ll be packing up and moving out later this morning. I still have some food here, I’ll give it to the other girls in the class. They’re all staying on here for at least a few days.

We went out for a celebratory drink last night. We found a place right on the beach with margaritas for only 15 pesos (less than $1)!

I would try to put up a couple of photos, but my computer is refusing to let me see them! It is apparently stuffed full and I need to delete some programs to make room. I’ve already been storing all my photos on thumbdrives, they’re not even on the computer. I have no idea what I can delete without screwing up something I need. I guess that means I can’t look at any photos til I get home to see the computer guy. 🙁

Crap Internet!

The internet here is shit tonight and I’m tired of messing with it!

Tomorrow I have another early class (at 0700) so I have to get up early. I’m NOT a morning person!

So, I’ll try to get back to you all tomorrow. Hopefully the internet will be working better.

 

Sunset

Today we had ourselves videotaped. We were all nervous in class and spent every minute practicing our grammar points and introductions. We went over to the other classroom (out of the glare) and we each got to present our grammar points in front of the camera. I’ll put up a link when they make it available.

Afterwards, I taught my one student again, we reviewed adverbs and adjectives and then had a few conversations to try and get the idea of how we show interest in English across. I think it went pretty well. Tomorrow we’ll start a new lesson and then it’s the weekend!

I went to watch the sunset on the beach right behind my apartment. There was a girl sitting out near the water with her little dachshund puppy. I enjoyed watching it running around and having so much fun.

It was a beautiful sunset, the tide was low today so I didn’t get soaked like last time. It was nice, with a little breeze and watching the sailboats, birds and the little puppy on the beach. Puerto Vallarta really is a great place to spend time. I could definitely see myself staying here for a while. 🙂

Color Your World: Green

Here’s my entry for Jennifer’s Color Your World challenge: green.

I took it at our big St Patrick’s Day celebration a couple of years ago. That’s our big event of the year at Surfside Beach. We have a big parade and everyone comes down to see everybody they haven’t seen since last year.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it this year. I’m still hoping to find a job soon!

500

Hey, I’m climbing up the ladder again, seems much slower this time, but I’m happy people are still liking me once they manage to find me. 🙂
This showed up today. 🙂
500 Likes
Congratulations on getting 500 total likes on Captain Jills Journeys.
Your current tally is 502.

New Shoes

Today’s prompt for the Just Jot It January challenge is: prestidigitation. I can’t really think of anything to say about that subject so I’m going to post about my shopping trip today.

From what I gather from the TV and newspapers, I must be pretty weird. I really don’t like shopping! The USA is now a consumer culture, rather than a producer culture. China makes stuff now. We just buy all the crap they make with money they loan us so we can do that. We’re supposed to enjoy shopping and spending money we don’t have (on stuff we don’t need).

Personally, I’m not much of a consumer. I have no desire to go out and buy new clothes, new shoes, make-up, perfume, etc. I’m perfectly happy with my shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops. If I have to, I can manage sneakers. And if they force me to at work, I will wear coveralls and steel-toed boots (tho I hate every minute of it!).

Since I’ve finally made up my mind to attend the TEFL course, I had to go shopping for shoes. They don’t allow sneakers (or flip-flops). They told me that I need to dress ‘professionally’. I’m not exactly sure what that means, since a person can be a professional in a lot of different ways. For instance, I am a professional mariner and the way a REAL professional mariner dresses is in shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops every chance they get (including on the boat)!

I have to assume they are talking about the sorts of people they refer to as professionals on TV. People like lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, etc. Personally, I would never have considered teachers to be in with that bunch.

Is it really just me? Or does it matter that much how a person dresses themselves? Do people really assume that you can’t do a proper job if you decide to be comfortable and maybe show a little bit of individuality instead of wearing the ‘uniform’ of the work you’re doing? Are people everywhere THAT hung up on an image?

I managed to find a pair of black slip-ons that were fairly comfortable. It’s not like we have a ton of shoe stores around here and that’s one thing I won’t even consider buying online. I hope they’re acceptable. I’ll probably never wear them anywhere again after this course is over, tho I hate to waste money like that. I thought about bringing my steel toed work boots, since they’re not sneakers (or flip-flops), but they’re nowhere near comfortable enough to be standing around in front of a class all day (or walking around sightseeing).

I really wish a lot of employers would loosen up! Let people be comfortable on the job! AND, stop trying to run peoples lives even when they’re OFF the job! (another post coming tomorrow on that subject).

Long Day

Today was a long day. I’m not sure why nothing seems to have been accomplished.

I’m too tired to do much for the Just Jot It January challenge (today’s prompt is: mittens), but even if my post for the day is super boring you can go click the link and see what everybody else has been doing. 🙂

I’ll try to catch up with posts and comments tomorrow.

Good night all. 🙂

Government

Today’s prompt for the Just Jot It January challenge is: surreptitiously.

That’s another hard one. I had to look it up to see exactly what it meant. 😉

adjective
1.obtained, done, made, etc., by stealth; secret or unauthorized;clandestine:
a surreptitious glance.
2.acting in a stealthy way.

3.obtained by subreption; subreptitious.

The only thing I can really think of to post about on that word is the US government. Instead of the way it’s supposed to act- honestly, openly and in the best interest of the American people, it acts behind closed doors, surreptitiously, and usually not in the best interests of the American people. In fact, usually it acts very much against our interests!

Our government has been taken over by special interests. Interests with BIG money. So much money that no politician is able to turn it down and do the job they were put there to do (protect the constitution). Instead, they take the money and pretend to the people that they do their jobs (sometimes not even that). They only do what their biggest donors pay them to do!

They sneak around behind closed doors and do whatever the hell they feel like! They all swore an oath to defend the constitution. But almost everything they do now is UN-constitutional! From the really big things like Obamacare, or abdicating their responsibility in Congress to actually debate and declare a war, or allowing the sickening (UN)Patriot(ic) Act, to the ‘little’ things like allowing thousands of un-elected bureaucrats to make ‘laws’ to run every tiny little detail of our lives.

Yeah, they pretty much have to act surreptitiously, otherwise the American people might actually wake up to their disgusting dereliction of duty and throw them all out (like we OUGHT TO)!

Collection

Today’s prompt for the Just Jot It January challenge is: collection.

I don’t really have anything I would consider a collection anymore. I used to be quite avid about my collections when I was a kid. I had a coin collection, a shell collection, a stamp collection, a rock collection. That all stopped when my stepfather threw all my stuff away while I was away at school.

Now, I have a half-assed collection of dragons, and a really small collection of mermaids. I don’t really spend much effort searching out items to fill my collections any more, but if I happen to see something that fits, I’ll pick it up.

I guess my library could be called a collection of books, tho I never had any specific purpose while gathering them together.

I have tons of books around here. Lots of different subjects: sci-fi, fantasy, horror, travel, sea stories, books about boats, how-to books, mysteries, political, history, historical novels, philosophy, art, music, medicine, paranormal romance. Pretty much anything and everything can interest me enough to buy a book and read it.  I really have too many books, I’ve already read almost all of them.

I’ve been trying to downsize. I’d like to move somewhere more affordable and less stressful. I don’t really want to pack up dozens of boxes of books again to fill a storage unit. So, I’ve been trying to whittle down my collection of books. That has been going very, very sloooowly.

Mostly because I want to re-read the books I still have left. They’re all the good ones I kept the last time I moved, plus the really good ones I’ve read since. I read a LOT, and I’ve been here a long time. So I still have a lot of books to sort through.

This time at home lately has been good for that. 😉

Teenage Idol

The Daily Post asks today (yesterday actually) who was your teenage idol?

Hard to remember that far back. 😉

I would have to say my biggest crush was on David Cassidy from the Partridge Family TV show. I liked the whole cast, but I thought he was just sooooooo cute! And he could sing too.

David Cassidy- photo from google

David Cassidy- photo from google

I liked their music. I guess it was pretty much made for little teeny-bopper girls. I even got my mom and my stepfather to take me to a concert one time. That was a thrill. Yeah, I remember screaming along with all the other little girls. My parents were amused by it all.

Effortless

Today’s prompt for Just Jot It January is: effortless. I’m having a hard time thinking of anything to do with me that’s been effortless, other than gaining weight!

I certainly never had to make any effort at all to do that. In fact, I make all kinds of efforts to reverse the trend and yet no matter how many efforts I make, the pounds just keep on piling on.

People mostly think it takes some kind of effort to gain weight. You have to eat “a lot”, “like a pig”, ‘too many sweets”, “lie around like a sloth”, “couch potato”, “lazy bum”,  etc. But nope, not really.

All the ‘authorities’ have to say is: “calories in = calories out”. Nope, that’s most definitely NOT the way it works for me!

I wish it were that simple. I really wish it was. If it was as effortless to lose weight as it is to gain it, that would be wonderful. 🙂

Just Jot It January: Sane

Here’s another Just Jot It January prompt I really have no idea what to do with.

The prompt for today is: sane. I’ve always thought of the word as meaning ‘normal’, specifically normal mentally. The dictionary says

adjective, saner, sanest.
1. free from mental derangement; having a sound, healthy mind: a sane person.
2. having or showing reason, sound judgment, or good sense: sane advice.

3. sound; healthy.

So,  I understand the definition of the word. Now, how about the way the word is used in reality. I always had a problem with the use of the word ‘normal’, like who gets to decide what is normal? How do they decide that? Who gets to pick who decides?

I have the same issues with the word ‘sane’. Who gets to decide who’s sane? Who gets to decide what’s reasonable? Why do those people get to decide? Who picked them? Are they sane? Who says?

Is all this picking and choosing just a matter of numbers? Of statistics? Of group think? Or is there a real, rational, reliable, repeatable, scientific way to judge sanity? (and/or normality)?

You really ought to watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (with Jack Nicholson), especially if you believe the psychiatrists are the ones who ought to be in charge of deciding who’s sane (and who’s not) and what to do with the ones who aren’t!

I remember having discussions about this kind of thing with my best friend J. We would argue for hours over what makes a society work, what kind of society is best for people, what is good for people, who decides, on what basis, what limits should there be on human freedom?

I was always on the side of the most freedom. I always argued that people (‘normal, “rational” adults’) had an inherent right to choose how best to live their own lives, that nobody else had any right to interfere. That as long as they weren’t objectively hurting anyone else, that they had the right to do whatever they wanted.

Most people, (my friend included) seem to feel like it all comes down to numbers. That if you’re in the minority, then you just have to suck it up and follow all the rules the majority happens to make, no matter how stupid or harmful they may be.

Is that sane?

SoCS Virgin- Frankenstein

This is my first time. I’m a SoCS virgin. I’m not really sure what I’m doing here. I’ve seen these SoCS badges around, but I never really figured out what was going on.

I’ve been participating in Linda’s Just Jot It January challenge and the prompt for today was: “SoCS- Title“. So, from what I gather, the idea with the SoCS post is to just write -freely- whatever comes to mind.

Then there is the prompt: title. I found a post that suggests we are to just pick a movie title. Just whatever comes to mind first. So, mine was “Frankenstein”. I was thinking of one of the old black and white versions (there have been a lot of movies featuring Frankenstein), but then I started thinking about Young Frankenstein. I loved that movie!

THAT was definitely my favorite version! I love scary (or supposed to be scary) movies. I love all those corny monster movies with the BUMs (bug-eyed monsters). I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons and we would always watch “Creature Feature”.

I loved Dracula and Frankenstein and the Werewolf. I really loved watching the Addams Family and the Munsters on TV. I read all kinds of stories on those kinds of things.

I really loved Young Frankenstein. Gene Wilder was cool, Marty Feldman was hilarious as Igor, the whole cast was great. A great Mel Brooks movie. I love Mel Brooks! Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, History of the World Part 1, High Anxiety. He’s up there with Monty Python. 🙂

Anyone who hasn’t seen Young Frankenstein by Mel Brooks, do yourself a favor and watch it. 🙂

Sleepless Since Skink

I tried to make an early night of it last night, so I could be awake and alert all day today at the conference. I had dinner at the hotel and was in bed by 1030.

My problem started when I decided to do a little reading before turning out the light. I was reading Carl HiaasensSkink No Surrender“. I really like his style, he’s got a great sense of humor and his books are always quick reads. I’m not sure how to classify this one; young adult? mystery? comedy? adventure? It had all that and more. Like all his writing, this book kept me interested til the end.

I also like his books because they remind me so much of where I grew up in Florida. His cast of characters and the adventures they get involved in are such pure Florida, it’s almost like going home again. 🙂

Johns Pass Florida

Johns Pass Florida

This book features Skink, a character familiar from previous stories. He’s always been one of my favorites and reminds me of some of the guys I grew up with on the beach over there (Johns Pass). My dad used to rent apartments to a lot of the people who came to the beach. We had some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met come through there.

My grandmother used to wonder why I always enjoyed hanging out with all those strange characters, but they were just so interesting. Travelers from all over, musicians, fishermen, artists, bartenders, etc. I heard some fantastic stories!

Skink No Surrender tells the story of a teenage boy (Richard) who’s worried about his cousin Malley who’s disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Skink helps Richard track her down and their adventures across Florida are pretty entertaining. 🙂

I tried a few times to stop reading and turn out the lights, but then I had to continue again and again. I finally finished the book and tried to go to sleep around 0230. Last time I looked at the clock, it was almost 0400.

I had the alarm set for 0730, conference starts at 0900. I’m probably going to have a hell of a time staying awake and paying attention. 🙁

Songs of the Sea: Girl and the Sea

 

Here’s a good Halloweeny Song of the Sea from the Presets. I really like how the video goes along with the lyrics and the music here. It makes for a  kind of melancholy and fantastical feeling. I thought it was a good one to post for Halloween weekend.

“Girl And The Sea”

Tonight the
Tonight the hills are watching her
As she runs towards the sea
Yeah she runs so she’ll be free

And of all the friends and enemies she’s made along the way
They are no where in her thoughts
As she dives beneath the waves

And he’s the one that you’ve seen sometimes on TV
And his shirt is on the ground
While he’s tackled by police
And the parcel that he throws across the bridge into the creek
It’ll flow towards the sea
It will meet with her tomorrow

No place,
Some time
We’ll clear
Our eyes
And when
You’re down
I’ll come around

And all the
Places she’s been along the way
Flames are licking at their walls
Night glows with their remains

From far away the animals come gather round to see
But she knows not how they feel
And she knows not what it means

When she was young we’d ask her what she’d like to be
And she’d close her eyes and dream…

…now we’re no where in her thoughts
As she dives beneath the waves.

A place
I’ve found
Could be
All ours
But I’ve seen
Where you
Would rather be.

Rainy Days

It’s been raining here non-stop for the last 2 days! I’ve been stuck in the house, can’t even take my daily walk. Planned to go to the Renaissance Festival for the Pirates, but that is NOT somewhere I want to be in the rain!

So….

It’s still going on every weekend til Nov 29th, so I’ll try to go another weekend when hopefully it’s not raining. The Barbarians will be there Nov 14-15, they should be almost as good as the Pirates. 😉

Since I’m just hanging around the house listening to the rain, I’ve been trying to fix my blog. So far I am making zero progress and getting nothing but frustration out of the project!

I did get my computer back from the shop, but they couldn’t fix the issue (virus that encrypts all my photos) and I am VERY upset over losing all that stuff! I had hundreds of photos on my thumb drive (put them there since computer was full up).

I can just be thankful it didn’t get into the computer too.

I met a guy on linkedin the other day who I HOPE can help me with some of this stuff. Otherwise, it’s getting to the point where I’m wondering if it’s going to be worth all the stress and aggravation. 🙁

I hope we can get together tomorrow to go over everything and he can start working on it soon. I’ll be busy most of the week with other things and won’t have another ‘free’ day til Friday.

Screwed Up Again!

More shit to deal with! My computer is screwed up again!!

Not JUST my blog now, but the computer. I’ll have to take it to the shop AGAIN and hope they can fix this one. 🙁

I hope I can get the old one to work, at least for the next few days.

 

Quick and Easy

Today was such a lazy day. I didn’t do anything much. I did manage to take my daily walk around the neighborhood, but that’s about it.

I finally got hungry enough to cook some dinner. I had some pork loin (center cut chops) I got on sale the other day that I never put in the freezer. I figured I had better cook it up before it went bad.

I cut it up into thin strips, sauteed it with some onions til it was pretty much done. Then I added a can of pineapple chunks, some frozen green beans and peas. I had one of those single serving rice cups I threw in the microwave and a few ‘cheese rangoons’ to heat in the oven.

Made a nice (so-called) Chinese dinner without having to go out. I would have called for delivery, but pizza is the only thing they’ll deliver around here.

For dessert I made some Waldorf salad. Apples, celery, raisins, cherries and mayonnaise. Just sweet enough and the apples went nice with the pork.

I like to cook. I don’t usually do any ‘fancy’ cooking (follow a recipe) anymore. Mostly since it’s just me and I don’t like to waste it. I learned to cook on the ship, so it’s still hard to cook for just 1. If I cook from a recipe I wind up eating the same thing for a week and still throwing half of it out! 🙁