2084 Brace

Thursday, October 23, 2008

I am now wearing the back brace. It has a hard trapezoidal panel in the back, heavy elastic that wraps around and closes with Velcro over the lower tummy, and then two "pull it tighter" elastic straps on each side.

It creates an extreme "muffin top" midway up my ribs.

I hope I don't need it tomorrow or the weekend, but I guess I'd best assume I will. That limits my choices in clothing for the trip. Muumuus? Caftans? Shifts? Blah. Not exactly sexy. He likes long skirts, but there's a limit. Good thing I have several kurtas. Looks like it's going to be kurtas and slacks for the weekend.

Mother is not happy.

Later - If you go to the "kurta" link above, notice the hands on the manikin. Seems like a poor design. It might make it hard to get tight sleeves or lacy knits on it. Last time I saw hands like that on something you have to dress was when Daughter was one year old and objected to wearing clothing.
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2083 Ouchy Back

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

I took those six loads of laundry to the laundromat yesterday. Piper is always surprised that I have a washer and dryer, but use the laundromat. It's because I can do all loads concurrently instead of consecutively, which saves time, and secondly because my hard water has messed up the washer valves, so you have to keep an eye on it constantly, or it will overfill and flood the laundry room and kitchen.

Anyway, taking one of the heavy bags out of the car last night, I got a sharp stab at the top of my left hip, so sharp I yelped. It lasted only an instant, but it was a warning.

I can walk for miles, and I can stand for hours, but I can't stand with my arms held out in front of me. It unbalances me, and, added to the boobage weight, stresses my lower back. So last night I spent a long time standing at washers, dryers, and a folding table, with my arms in front of me, and then followed that by unloading the car at home, then reloading it with recycle containers.

This morning I had to dump the (6) containers into the recycle bin, the opening of which is over my head.

Today my lower back is yelling at me, and I'm yelping back. It's causing powerful abdominal/intestinal cramps. I'm running on aspirin today. I'm still working my way through the to-do list, but I think I'll skip the movie tonight.

It's got to feel better soon. I'll never last on an airplane with it like this, even is it is only a 90 minute flight. That'll wipe me out completely.
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2082 Busy

Tuesday, October 22, 2008

I've actually been doing my to-do list! Between yesterday and today, I've:
- sniped five eBay auctions, won all
- paid two months worth of bills
- cleared two feet of paper off the ironing board in the kitchen (flat surfaces collect paper)
- cleaned two litter boxes
- hit the big grocery store down the road
- got the Hairless Hunk to straighten my mailbox (again), which had been hit (again) and twisted 90 degrees to the road (again)
- watched three TV shows on TV, and two news programs on the computer
- did six loads of laundry, folded, ironed, put away
- my favorite clothing store sent me a nice gift coupon for my birthday, and their online store was having a 25% off everything sale, so I hit their "outlet" clearance section and bought a blouse (reg $75) and a skirt (reg. $120) for a total of $9
- looked up the weekend's flight to check where we were sitting - we got exit row! Both ways!
- discussed with The Man what we might do over the weekend, I was very surprised to learn that he wants to visit a botanical garden, I'd never have guessed. He hates walking, and outdoors
- packed up two month's worth of metal, plastic, and glass for recycle, and loaded it all into the car.

Early to bed tonight. I need to get to the recycle center by 9 am tomorrow, in order to be home to snipe another eBay auction at 10:30, then meet Piper for lunch. Afternoon - wash hair, do nails, visit bank, get mail held, decide what to pack for weekend. Evening - go to Rosendale to see movie "W". That last one's a maybe. Depends on what I get done and how I feel.

This is more than I've accomplished in a whole average week lately. Maybe even two or three weeks. I've been very lazy. It feels good to check things off the list.
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2081 Eyeball

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

This is a game where you test your skill at geometric estimation. I got a score of 4.03, which is about average. I'm best at convergence, parallelograms, and right angles, and worst at locating the center of a triangle, circle, or line segment.

I didn't notice it at first, but your scores on the three passes are kept on the right, so you can see how well you're doing. I got better on each pass, so I guess with practice, I would improve.
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2080 SNL is unprofessional

Monday, October 20, 2008

I watched Saturday Night Live last weekend, for the first time in ages, and rediscovered why I don't watch it.

Nobody bothers to learn their lines.

Soap opera people are on every day - they've got seven shows worth of script to learn every week, week after week, and they do it. The SNL folks can't be bothered to learn lines for a 3-minute skit. They read the words off cue cards or a teleprompter. More than half the time it looks like they've never seen those lines before, they're reading it for the first time, and aren't sure where it's going.

It's ugly, because they don't look at the person they're talking to. Not even close.

At the very least, you'd think they could put the cheat sheet close to, over the shoulder of, the other character, so they'd at least be looking in the other character's direction when they're supposed to be talking to them. There's no reason why camera angles couldn't be planned to accommodate that.

Nah. It's like 30 degrees or more off, so they're not even facing them.

I think this shows a huge lack of consideration for the audience, and a lack of pride in the product.
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2079 Bloglines is fixed.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Well, I'm going to take credit for the fix to Bloglines. Within hours of my email to them, the backlog of missing posts from a small herd of blogs started pouring in. The timing is interesting.

I had mentioned to them that the problem first started right after they had moved a data base. I'll bet someone at Bloglines read my email, smacked themselves in the head, and said "Oops! Forgot to update the whatchamadoodle pointer!"
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2078 Clutter on YouTube!

There are now over 80, almost 90, mostly identical clips of the Colin Powell interview on YouTube. It has grown from zero in only 14 hours. I'm sure there will be more, uploaded by people who think no one has seen it yet.

Clutter! They're going to kill YouTube with overload!

Is it really so difficult to check to see if there's already a copy of something before storing another? Is it an ego thing, to see one's own id on one's own copy?

(Um, one's "own" copy of copyrighted material. Oops.)
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2077 Powell's Endorsement

Sunday, October 19, 2008

If you missed Meet the Press today, you must watch this clip.



[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_NMZv6Vfh8]

A comment from "gojohnnygo5" on the video:

I love this quote my Deacon told me once:
"We do not have permanent friends nor permanent enemies. We only have permanent principles."

Crossing party lines should not be such a big deal if a person had a set of values because if this person ever felt that his party is no longer representing his principles, it would be the only viable decision for anyone of strong character.

2076 Bits

Sunday, October 19, 2009

Daughter is 34 today. Next week, I will be 65. I have no grandchildren. I'm getting anxious.

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I registered on Classmates.com a long time ago, hoping to find old classmates. I've been contacted by two college classmates, one high school classmate, and one old coworker (all male), so it hasn't been a complete bust. I have also been left contact info for another 150+ people, also all male. A few of them went to the same school I listed, but several years before or after me, so I never knew them. The vast majority are complete strangers. I don't know why they've signed my guestbook. A few of them return over and over.

Is it possible they think it's an online dating site?

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More and more blogs from my Bloglines list are missing feed alerts, even some big ones like the Dilbert blog. Bloglines' trouble reports didn't list the problem. Either it's unique to me, or no one else has noticed. Yesterday I finally sent an email to Bloglines, telling them what I'm seeing, or more accurately not seeing. Today suddenly some, but not all, of the posts are showing up again. It looks like they've fixed something.

Very strange. Am I the only person who pointed it out to them? I can't believe that.

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I like to read real estate magazines (those local listings you pick up at the grocery store) and online listings, especially those with interior photos or virtual tours. I'm seeing a lot of kitchens with the stove kind of stuck awkwardly in the middle of an open wall, all alone, away from any counters. It's not like the new stove was too big - there's no space in the rest of the kitchen where an old stove would have been.

That confuses me. It looks like when the kitchen was designed, they forgot there'd be a stove.

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I have a gray sweatshirt with the smooth on the inside and the fuzz on the outside. It's meant to look inside-out. You can tell by the seams and the care label. It even applies to the writing on the chest - it's crossed hockey sticks with "Hockey" above, and "EST. 1898" on either side of the sticks - a faint impression in the fuzz, exactly as it would be if the real printing were on the other side (but there's nothing on the other side, the inside - it's a fake).

I don't wear it often beyond my house and the village, but the few times I've worn it, a few people have laughed and asked why I'm wearing it inside-out, tee hee.

The part that blows my mind is that in every case, it was a Mensan who felt moved to point out my error. (Like I needed to be told.)

And in every one of those cases, it blew my mind further that those Mensans didn't notice until I pointed it out that the writing on the chest is not mirror-image! Which it would be if it were the "inside", or backward, image.

Sigh.

Oh, while we're on Mensa, Roman did exactly what I was afraid he'd do, and dropped out of the running for the governing board as soon as he found out that there were five other candidates. So, no election again. The five remaining candidates are declared elected. I'm pissed. Especially because one of the other candidates is an idiot (an idiot who wants to be the treasurer).
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2075 Thud - Monroe is in Michigan, you fool!

Sunday, October 19, 2008

This week's PostSecrets is headed by an envelope with the PostSecrets address, sent from somewhere in south Florida. The address is given as "Germantown, Marilyn".
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2074 Body Shaper

Friday, October 17, 2008

You know those body shapers you see advertised on TV? We used to call them "foundations", or "girdles". They're now much lighter in weight, and much more expensive. I wanted to try one anyway.

I found some on eBay, and with judicious sniping, I managed to get four different types for the price of one. Figured I'd find out what style I like best.

According to the size charts, I wear a size medium, or B, so that's what I ordered. There's no return unless they send the wrong thing, so I had examined the size charts (height and weight) carefully.

Well, I screwed up on one of them, and ordered a size XL. Oops.

That was the first one to arrived, last Wednesday. It's a two-piece type, a top and bottom.

Because it's a bit big, it didn't do much to smooth out those bulges I have in the back, between the bra band and waistband. In fact, the waistband on the bottom was so tight it made the bulge above the waistband worse. The bottom didn't do much to smooth those lumps on either side at the top of my thighs, either.

And yet, the bottom was so tight and restrictive across my middle that I had to take it off after only three hours. It was making my stomach hurt, and the waistband cut into my waistline.

That was the XL. Uh-oh.

A medium Loba and a size B Spanx arrived today, both one-piece high-waist and long thigh. The Loba (from Brazil, no English in or on the package) is as thick and heavy as a '50s girdle, and no wider than a double palm-width. My stomach hurts just looking at it. The Spanx looks and feels lighter, but it has a heavy band that goes under the bust, and just holding it up to me I suspect it will be so tight I won't be able to breathe.

Not a good feeling to be so out of shape a girdle doesn't work.
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2073 Caption THIS!

Friday, October 17, 2008

This is a real, virgin, photo (or possibly a still from video). You can find it at the very end of this video clip from the end of the 10/15 debate. It's very quick, but the hands and tongue are right. The point of view must have been from the right, which would make them look closer than in the video.

A few bloggers are running caption contests.

My favorite so far is "Invisible Palin".
One also thinks of Gollum, chocolate, and gorgeous Black behinds.
Anyone else want to offer one?
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2072 Vote, Saris, Leaves

Friday, October 17, 2008

Important - If you plan to vote a straight party ticket, to make sure your vote counts, READ THIS:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/straightticket.asp

The description is confusing. On one hand, I get the impression that if you vote for the president, and then vote "straight" party, that amounts to two votes for president, and your president vote will be thrown out. On the other hand, I get the impression that if you simply vote "straight" party, without a separate vote for president, this does not necessarily include a vote for president.

It's confusing.

The solution, if it isn't clear on the ballot or in the booth, is to vote for every candidate separately, even if you do intend straight party.

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I had a long lunch yesterday with a young Pakistani woman from whom I buy saris. I had noticed that many of the used saris I buy on eBay and elsewhere are advertised as "worn once". She told me that the younger Pakistani and Indian women in the US wear saris pretty much only to ceremonies and family parties (only "Aunties" wear them daily). And the women tend to be supremely competitive where clothing is concerned. Since you always see a lot of the same people at the occasions where you'd wear a sari, once you've worn one, it's done. You can't wear it again without losing face (and making your husband look cheap, I suppose).

Wow! That can get expensive! Given that a silk sari can easily run $180 for a print to $1000 and more for gold embroidery, and given that families and communities are large so occasions are frequent, well, my head spins.

So women will sell a sari for pennies on the dollar after one wearing.

I said it sounded like there might be a market for rental saris, and she was aghast. No one would wear a rental! "It's like a wedding gown."

Then I was aghast.

Hmmmm. There might be a market for "American" styles custom made from a favorite but "done" sari. Jackets, skirts, robes?

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I don't like fall, mainly because it means winter is coming, and I hate winter. Other people rave about the colors of the autumn leaves, but they mostly leave me cold. Literally. I figure if I've seen one red tree, I've seen them all.

Driving cross-county through the mountains to lunch yesterday, I found something I can appreciate. I love seeing clear areas, like open woods, large lawns, completely covered in yellow maple leaves. Especially with a flock of wild turkeys scratching in the leaves.

That's pretty ok.

Then, driving south to dinner last night, the sun was at a steep angle, so that it was hitting the trees on the east side of the road straight on, and in some cases lighting them from underneath, so that they were firey bright.

That was pretty ok, too.

But I still hate winter.
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2071 Tired

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

When I make certain loud high-pitched sounds, Jasper's eyes get big and he stares at me with his ears turned completely around to the back. He looks like a great horned owl.

I forgot to mention that when I got home Tuesday morning, I found that he had taken a mouse apart on my bed. It looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone.

Watched the debate tonight. Prefer this format. No comments spring to mind.

On the other hand, this is cool - what alternate universe is Sarah Palin living in?

I have a lunch tomorrow with one of my sari sellers, and dinner with Mensa. I don't know that I can eat two meals in one day!

I don't know why, but I'm very tired. I was thinking of bed all day today.
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2070 Real Time

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

"It’s one thing to speak at a rally and steer the crowd into feeling an animosity toward your opponent’s platform; however, when you drive them to hate and fear your opponent as a person by painting the man as a terrorist bent on destroying everything they hold dear, you are no longer campaigning. You are simply a coward creating a modern-day lynch mob fueled by a dangerous and enraged collective ignorance." - Dan, at "The Wisdom of a Distracted Mind"

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To NJ last night. Sushi and The Big Bang Theory with The Man. We're working our way through season 1, finished off disk 2 of 3 last night. He swears he hadn't seen season 1 except for one or two episodes he'd stumbled upon, but he was speaking some of the best lines right along with the characters. Strange.

A regular episode of season 2 was on TV last night, but he's one of those people who won't watch any of the next season until he's seen all of the previous season. Sheesh. That means you never see anything in "real time". He loves Boston Legal, too, but he's so far behind he may never catch up. Not in "real time", anyway.
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2069 Bits

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Many years ago, probably in the late '60s, I visited Mystic, Connecticut, where I saw what was described as recreations of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. They were tiny!

I asked if that was the actual size, or if these were scale models, and the costumed male docent assured me these were the actual size. I asked how many crew members each carried, and the docent told me 6 on the Nina, 9 on the Pinta, and 13 on the Santa Maria. There was no room in the holds, so the crew slept on deck. The Nina was so small that even 6 men sleeping on deck was crowded.

I believed him.

For the past 40 years, when I've seen those ships represented in movies, and the large crews they carried, I snorted. Historical inaccuracy!

Well, the docent was wrong. I don't know if he was stupid, or just teasing me, but what he told me, and what I believed for so many years, was simply not true. Here is the actual crew list. The Santa Maria carried 40, the Pinta 26, and the Nina 20.

Happy Columbus Day. Unless you're native American.

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With all the moving I've done, and all the looking at houses when Daughter and Hercules were house-shopping, I've seen many bathrooms where the tub/shower has been placed against an outside wall, with a window above the tub.

Inevitably, the window sill rots from shower water, water gets into the wall, the wall softens, and you get moldy insulation and falling tile.

I have never understood why people allow this, when it's so easy to avoid the problem.

Some people cover the glass with a stick-on translucent covering, but people rarely put a curtain on the window, because "it gets wet".

Well, duh? Why don't they put a plastic curtain there, wider than the window and extending lower than the window sill? No more problem with shower water. Depending on the height of the top of the window, or the force of the water hitting the side of the curtain, an even better solution might be a second rod and shower curtain on that wall, cut short or installed high, reaching just past the top of the tub, so that when it's open it doesn't interfere with baths.

There's still a condensation problem. People think that if you have a window, you don't need an exhaust fan. Wrong. You need an exhaust fan because there's a window that will attract condensation, and the window should be double-paned to lessen the attraction.

So why are there rotted bathroom walls? They shouldn't exist.

(Many European bathroom showers don't have doors or curtains, or even enclosing walls. The shower head comes out of the wall, and there's a drain in the middle of the bathroom floor. It's actually kind of nice, but I've wondered about the soap scum problem involving the entire bathroom. On the other hand, it's easy to rinse the whole room down after scrubbing. You can even throw buckets of water around.)

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I'm still having problems with feeds. http://thesilkentouch.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default hasn't shown any posts since October 2, and http://www.blogger.com/feeds/19031106/posts/default had a burst of twelve posts last Friday, but nothing since. Bloglines insists this blog URL doesn't exist. I checked with several verifiers, and they all say there's nothing wrong.

I don't understand....

Later - I just discovered I'm not getting Bloglines feeds from OTHER blogs, either. The last post I got through Bloglines from http://www.shoeboxblog.com/ was September 29. They normally post several times a day. Feeds from http://svensto.blogspot.com/ also died on September 29. There are many others. Now I wonder if it's just me, or is it happening for others, too. Anyone else missing feeds? Bloglines "help" seems unaware there's a problem.

Something in Bloglines is broken - at least for me it is.

2068 Reedin n Ritin

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Back in my day (sit back and listen to the little old lady) we read. We read good books, and a lot of them. TV channels were few. We didn't have computers, or the internet, or iPods, or even transistor radios. We didn't have spellcheck, where you can accept a correction without thinking about it. We wrote real letters. When we wrote a research paper, we actually had to read the reference documents. Most of what we read was written by professional writers, proofed by professional proofreaders, and edited by professional editors, all of whom had respect for the language.

We absorbed vocabulary, spelling, grammar, construction, and usage by osmosis, and it was reinforced by our teachers all the way through school. Along the way we also absorbed attention to detail, and most of us learned critical thinking.

Today's youth don't read, not like we did, anyway. Most of what they read is written by each other! Errors, bad grammar, bad spelling, all the faults that lead to difficulties in interpretation, are reinforced. Detail is no longer important. Structure is not important. I don't think anyone is teaching about homonyms any more. The wrong homonyms are increasingly turning up everywhere. I am sick of seeing the increasing use of "site" when people mean "sight".

Is conjugation still taught? If so, why are so many people having so much trouble with the various forms of "lie" (as in "to lie down", as opposed to "to tell an untruth")?

It's getting really sad, especially because we are now seeing the effects as these young folks grow up and move into business, advertising, journalism, spokesperson positions, and even (God help us) teaching, where they perpetuate and exacerbate the problem.

I'm seeing things now that clam to be professional efforts, and I look at them and think, "Didn't anyone proofread or review this before it was released?"

The evidence tells me that no one is reviewing anything any more. Junior employees are told to put something out, and they write it up and out it goes without any review.

A current example is the hundreds of absentee ballots sent out by Rensselaer County, NY, wherein the candidate's name is listed as "Barack Osama". They claim it's a typo. Yeah, sure, the "s" is nowhere near the "b", folks. Whatever. Did no one review this, did no one proofread it, before it went out?. Oddly enough, they claim it was reviewed and approved by three different people, and missed. You know, that scares me more. There wasn't much writing on the page. That says that reviewers aren't reviewing.

I've already mentioned how I decorate the local school newsletters with the red pen of frustration, and mail them back to the superintendent's office anonymously. Don't they have any English teachers on staff who could review them before they're mailed? Worse, I doubt that teacher review would have helped.

My broadband support puts out a message when the device is first plugged in: "Please wait while configuring your device". Uh, did anyone review that message before it was shipped? Did no one notice that egregious sin of dangling a participle? Did no one suggest, "Please wait while we configure your device" or "Please wait while your device is configured"? Why did they use the most awkwardly incorrect construction possible? Does anyone even KNOW what a dangling participle IS these days?

It's snowballing, and it makes me sick.

I'm hoping Harry Potter can help, but even the advances of a new generation of readers can be held back by the sloppiness that surrounds them on all sides. Including the schools.
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2067 An opinion on real estate prices

Saturday, October 11, 2008

There's a piece of the mortgage crisis that everyone seems to be overlooking or discounting.

Real estate prices (I refuse to say values) shot way up over the past few years. The reason was the ease of obtaining credit. It used to be that you could obtain a mortgage commensurate with your ability to pay. If you had a certain income, the banks would tell you that you could afford, say, a $150,000 house, and that was that. When you went shopping, you looked at $150,000 houses. If you were selling a house, you had to be careful not to overprice it, so you wouldn't price yourself out of the market.

And then suddenly, mortgages got easier to qualify for. On the same salary as above, you could get a $200K, or $500K mortgage. So that's the size house you looked for.

Most people really don't have a realistic idea of what they can afford. They don't plan for a crisis. And real estate prices were going up, so they figured that if it turned out that they couldn't afford it, well, they'd just sell it and walk away with a profit. Nobody ever loses money on a house, right?

Well, with looser money, the folks who sell houses realized they may as well get some of that, too. So the prices on houses rose. The same folks who used to buy a $150K house are now shopping for a $250K house, so the house that used to sell for $150K is now priced at $250K. A market-driven inflation. (Not so suddenly, of course, but the movement was inevitable and inexorable, but not inexplicable. It should have been expected.)

In some areas of the country now, it's not unusual to find a four room "fixer-upper" on 1/6 acre in a bad neighborhood listed at $300K. This is patently ridiculous. It's a "deal" only because everything else around it is priced higher.

Home prices were rising faster than salaries. Defaults were rife. Now there are "bank owned" properties on the market, selling for less than average, so it's bringing averages down. It could be a good deal for buyers, except that if they have to sell one house to buy another, they can't.

I see another problem brewing.

Lenders are going to get tougher. You're going to have to really qualify for that mortgage. The banks, having been burned, are now going to tell you that you qualify for only $150K again. But anyplace you'd want to live is priced higher than that, so the real estate market is going to drop. The original $150K house will eventually drop to $150K, because the trough is empty.

This will be good news for buyers.

This will be very bad news for homeowners and sellers.

If you had bought a home with a mortgage in the past five years, you're going to find your house is worth less on the market than you owe on it. Your equity is negative. You won't be able to refinance it, and you'll take a loss on selling it. And if you've been conscientiously making the payments, the government is unlikely to help you.

You are screwed.
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2066 Nudge Nana!

Saturday, October 11, 2008

This cracked me up, especially 3:13. Not safe for work, unless you turn the volume down, but then you'd miss it all. Her language would get her spanked in my house, nice-looking young lady or not, but the message is funny.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgHHX9R4Qtk]

2065 Tracking the Market

Friday, October 10, 2008

I've been watching the charts for the various stock market indices, and I noticed something odd. Every day, they start out low, drop lower through the morning and early afternoon until they hit an extreme low, then they start climbing again! They climb steadily until about 4:30 pm, then they quickly drop halfway again - and that's where they start the same pattern the next day.

Odd pattern?

I think I know what's happening. People who are panicking are selling off. That's what causes the early fall. It's a bit annoying to me that when the news outlets report the activity, they report the low point for the day, without mentioning the rise. That only contributes to more panic.

Then the folks who see this as an opportunity wait until prices fall about as low as they're going to fall, and they start buying. That's what bumps it back up.

A lot of people are going to get very very rich from this. They're buying valuable stock at bargain basement prices.

I hope someone has seen fit to order a temporary halt on day-trading and other fast and short-term trades. Otherwise, you could buy a hunk of equities at 1 pm, and sell at 4 pm, and make a tidy profit, and if a lot of people are doing it, the turnover would contribute to the volatility, and increase the panic. Which, of course, benefits the people profiting.

I gave Piper the order today to jump in, and buy me some indexed and total market mutual fund shares, using the cash in my money market accounts. When the market rebounds (and it eventually will, as understanding of what happened and why grows), I could make an immediate 25% profit, at least.

Piper was bemoaning the fact that he couldn't get in. "I wish I had $200,000 or so available!" I expressed surprise. Of all people, I'd expect HIM to have a spare $200,000 lying around, but he says it's "all tied up" in investments he can't sell right now.

So, if you have some money, buy. If you aren't sure of the health of individual companies, buy indexed or total market mutual fund shares. You can find their phone numbers in any investment magazine. All you have to do is call.
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