Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Weather... In the 80°'s, humid and blue-sky'd light-breezy Saturday (the 14th). The wind being up allows the inch worms to launch themselves upon the wind with their silken threads. A bout of asthma on the 21st. A bit of weed whacking (well... a little) and mowing the lawn the cause. Good thing my cold (or whatever the malady) had recently finished running its course. The last rain storm and the current heating trend has exacerbated the Sierra snow pack melt/runoff. We had a better than average snow pack this year in the Sierra's... about 120% of normal in the greater Tahoe area. The dams here-about's are allowing for greater flows into the rivers, the reservoirs being at high capacity, giving heavy flow and widened banks on the American, Yuba, and other rivers that 'feed' the Sacramento River. One fishing spot I saw in Sacramento, that's usually a tree studded gravelly area, now has the trees inundated with about 6-feet (2-meters) deep of fast moving water. Warnings have been given by the media for: hypothermia and fast-moving flows and flotsam for those who wish to tempt fate. I set a goal to make an anagram out of one of the Elders' names... Failure. (5) of the letter "a"'s my downfall. I even tried the Samoan language dictionary which is rich in multi-voweled words to no avail. His name includes a biblical name containing the letter "c"... which doesn't appear in the Samoan alphabet... Oh well. Another goal... edit my BLOGGER template's CSS. I have embedded on my 'puter the background gif's I want viewed that reference my C: drive in the HTML... but not an external source so that anyone might view, at least IE users with pix enabled, the same background. Speed was one concern... proper implementation another. Just a little bit of study on how others' BLOGs are done within BLOGGER's constraints. Perhaps another BLOG face-lift soon? Note to self: Chapter 58 "Seven Pillars..."? Star Wars III... it's a definite maybe. My wife was pregnant with my daughter back in '77 (that's '100 in Canadian) when the first Star Wars, Episode IV, came out. We went to the drive-in in Union City, California to see it. Gail spent most of her time going back and forth to/from the restroom. Gail brought out the two kittens to feed on some lunch meat. I've named them "Little Squeeky" after Taffy-Doodles' sister who passed away a few years back, and "Little Dude" after Taffy-Doodles... maybe just "Taffy" if we find it's not a boy. Taffy-Doodles isn't the Daddy, he's 'fixed', but the real Daddy and another stray stubbed-tail cat have been hanging around more and more lately. Brings up the "kitty count" to a number that I don't care to think about. Anyone want a kitty? SpywareBlaster 3.4 is out for those who do their own anti-spyware 'thang'. It's freeware and reputedly blocks the spyware from even entering your system. I keep Gail's and my 'puter updated at least weekly along with all the other anti-virii and anti-spyware stuff: SpywareBlaster, AVG, ZoneAlarm, A2, AdAware, Spybot Search and Destroy... my main freeware spyware aps in current use. Earthlink 2005's Mail does a good job of picking out some nasties as well. The 'sober worm' has been found and quarantined at least once a week in my spam-filtered email. Kind'a funny... Gail couldn't get online with her SBC client. The error code (error 691) referred to bad user name/password/client. Evidently she's only had to click the connect button for the last many months (remember password and user: enabled) and 'someone', not me, had deleted the user and password entries by accident. After correcting her user name entry, from '@sbcglob.net' to '@sbcglobal.net', we still got the error 691 code. We finally hit upon the idea of using her password in all lowercase letters... Bingo! She uses the same password "name" for her SBC Yahoo account (which she always has to re-enter... all in caps) as she does for her SBC online logon. So... ya' wan'na get rid of ants but want to do it without the hazardous chemicals. Equal parts baking yeast, sugar and honey in a covered container with lots'a holes fer dem bitty critters. 120 Latter Day Saint (LDS) Temples worldwide and counting as the San Antonio, Texas, USA, Temple is dedicated May 22, 2005. Watch the progress of the Sacramento, California, USA, LDS Temple via web cam. Jury duty requested of me for June the 20th. I have no idea how I'll be able to swing that. Earthquake prediction map for California???... no way!!! (yes... way!) BIG EARTHQUAKES... from the bigquake mailing list I subscribe to: A magnitude 6.9 earthquake in the Nias Region, Indonesia has occurred at: 0.56N 98.38E Depth 30km Sat May 14 05:05:18 2005 UTC Location with respect to nearby cities:
A magnitude 6.6 earthquake south of the Kermadec Islands has occurred at: 32.87S 179.30W Depth 10km Mon May 16 03:54:11 2005 UTC
A magnitude 6.7 earthquake in Simeulue, Indonesia has occurred at: 2.00N 96.97E Depth 30km Thu May 19 01:54:53 2005 UTC
My entries... poetry.com: " Poetry in Motion "...
" Enchant Me... "... I like this entry. Guess I should like one, myself, every now and then. " Reminisce "... The poem 'sounded' good when 'penned'. I'm having second thoughts on whether memories can share anything. " Honor The Father "... John 5:23 comes to mind (after looking it up)... I'm by no means a scriptarian " Broken Sky " a Haiku(NOT): ... well I goofed. One too many syllabibbles in the first line. Guess I've been pronouncing the word 'mosaic' wrong all these years... "moes-ache" instead of "mo-sa-ic" (correct). I still liked the imagery. The photo was of a gliding swan on a glass-appearing, albeit rippled, body of water (shown before). I created the Haiku "The Swan" 4-3-2004 from the same photo. All of the photos are beginning to look recycled to me. " h8 "... Another warm and fuzzy by Bobby Nichols. I hope the '8' becomes subscripted as intended... the 'h' preceding purposely in lower capitalization. Tofa !!! |
C'ya.
Friday, May 13, 2005
Weather... Gorgeous Spring days Wednesday and Thursday and Friday... rain next Monday-Wednesday??? Gail had the horse shoer, or farrier, up this way to trim Eeyore's (our donkey) hooves. They seem to grow much faster than Gail's two Arabian horse's hooves. Saudi, the stallion, will 'prolly' get his hooves trimmed next month. The fencing 'round here needs a serious look-see. Called Mom on Mother's Day. Alaska is in its looong day cycle. It stays light until 10 p.m., ADT (Alaskan Daylight Time), if I remember correctly. Mom's feeling "under the weather" as well (as bad?). All in all we had a nice short chat while we condoled each other over our illnesses. Oops! A Mozilla Firefox/Suite bug in need of fixing. Patch to follow shortly I'm sure... And here it is... Firefox 1.0.4 (that was fast!!!) a 4.6 MB download. Ya know Firefox has hit the big time when a lot of time and energy is being used by the media, and in the white hat/black hat sector. Tuesday afternoon the 10th: After feeding the horses, with the help of my grand-daughter Ashley, I felt a tickle in my throat... I've Gail's sore throat manifesting, or festing, upon me. Gargling with salt water, gargling with Listerine. Hope I don't get the small bout of laryngitis she had. I teased her a few times about her loss of voice and she warned me she might do the same if I became sick. Time to hit the store shelves in search of those raspberry cough drops I used last year. I had battled a small sinus affliction the previous Friday through Sunday. The sinus cavity below the right eye felt like an ice-pick was being inserted into it. Aspirin and Sudafed and a home-made hot water bag (from three leaky sandwich bags... one inside the other, etc., heated by a microwave oven I'd been given) on Sunday evening seemed to clear that out. Gail and I are still ill Friday the 13th. My entries... poetry.com: " Poetry in Motion "...
" Life "... An awkward piece... an edit surely to follow. " Niagara " a Haiku: ... A view of Niagara Falls, with two distant excursion boats excursioning, from the aspect of two trees framing the vista, appeared to be the photo for inspiration. The link I created utilizes Google's "Images" search. Note: Onen !!! |
C'ya.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Weather: Thursday the 5th... it's raining and the grandkids are going bonkers... On and off rain through Monday the 9th. We were treated to a couple of hail storms and thunder showers on Monday the 9th due to an unseasonable cold mass of air from the north... tornado watches were in effect down Sacramento way most of the day... snow in the Sierras. Forecast of near 80°'s Fahrenheit for next week??? Query... Were the fig trees so slow in developing their leaves from their buds last year? They've barely changed since January. Dunno. Gail's van... It lives!... needs tires. Sports:
BIG EARTHQUAKES... from the bigquake mailing list I subscribe to: A magnitude 6.5 earthquake south of Panama has occurred at: 5.62N 82.49W Depth 10km Thu May 5 19:12:18 2005 UTC Location with respect to nearby cities:
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake southwest of Sumatra, Indonesia Location with respect to nearby cities:
My entries... poetry.com: "
" Glory "... a modest edit of my entry in the contest. " Repressor "... A bit of poetic license... I turned an adjective 'dire' into a verb (or is it an adverb?). Anywho... 'dire' sort'a kind'a rhymes with 'desire', lacking but one syllabibble, and kind'a connotes love's demise while denoting the fear or dread of love. The poem made more sense to me when I coined it. " Singularity Redux "... I already had a poem titled "Singularity" hence 'redux'. " Moth " a Haiku: ... A photo of a moth spotlighted on a clutch of flowers used for inspiration. " Spring Enchantment " a Haiku: ... What I saw in the photo of a frozen falls with snow clumped in heaps about, through bough of tree and landing of rock, were færies cavorting down a frozen Spring falls headfirst... The 'vernal', or spring, aspect due to the inclement weather about our area this 9th/early 10th of May as if by enchantment. Salamaik tingga !!! |
C'ya.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
I found my quote selections by entering the word "empty" in the search box at www.greatest-quotations.com/ and selecting from the first page of quotations. Why "empty" one might ask? The answer may become apparent in a most convoluted manner later in this post. "Erudition" means "Great learning" according to my dog-bitten copy of F&W. It's amazing what one can learn from a book at hand, albeit dusty (and possibly dog-bitten). The use of http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Erudition: an online dictionary/encyclopedia/etc. comes in handy as well!!! A bit of a bother, sometimes, with editing my BLOG in BLOGGER. Links are mangled after pasting the HTML into the editor. Evidently the BLOGGER edit engine will try to add further "a href" and "/a" tags to random HTML link strings. Also the spacing got warped a bit, and a font size magically changed by itself. Stuff to edit! For image manipulation... Irfanview 3.97 has been released. One of my favorite freeware aps among applications that I use frequently. The batch rename and batch file type conversion features have saved me a lot of time editing photos. A built-in slide show feature makes for quick viewing of large picture files... I'll use this feature after taking digital photos at the grandkid's parties to entertain the grandkid's, and me and Grandma, shortly afterwards. Don't forget to download the Plug-ins for extra functionality. My entries... poetry.com: " Poetry in Motion "...
" The Gargoyle "... O.K. - I was stumped for a title. I almost always "write" the poem first then wrestle with myself in giving the poem a title. I took the fifth word ("empty"), then the third word after ("illuminating"), then the seventh word after that ("cement") from my poem (a combination of my "lucky" number '537') and then "googled" the word-trio in quotations ("empty illuminating cement")... no hits. Next tried all the other (5) combinations of the three words within the quotations... no hits. Hmmm... tried the three words without quotes in the English language pages using "Google"... 19,500 hits! O.K. - then I tried only selecting German pages (after changing my Google Preferences for "Search Language" in Google)... 8 hits! Hmmm... still too many... only French pages in Google... oops, 11 hits! Chinese... 5 hits. Tried a few other language pages and finally got a language with only one hit... Arabic!!! Now what? I search the page persianblog.com/?date=13820306&blog=ghafelzadeh... it's a Persian BLOG!!! What a poetic form the written word is in Arabic... beautiful. Hey! There's an Allen Ginsberg work titled "Howl" in English on the page and after searching using the EDIT tab and FIND function using IE6's browser with my 'key' words one at a time... all three of my words are contained in the "Howl" piece listed!!! Cool!
COOL!!!... now here's some fodder for a title!!! How about "The Cement Sphinx", or one poetic step beyond to "The Gargoyle"... that's it!!!... "The Gargoyle"!!! Who said giving titles to a poem was hard???... " The Comforter "... A pious piece proffered. " Fare du Jour " a Haiku: ... This poem leapt from my soul with a mind of its own before I reached the Haiku entry page. The photo, of all things, was of a hot air balloon... so I wasn't being prescient. I guess it's just one of those poems that had to be written now... and I was chosen. Khoda hafaz !!! |
C'ya.
... digg.com
