3553 Playing tourist

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Many men don't really want to hear what a woman has to say. They say they do,

but they don't, and they telegraph that. They end up teaching their women

not to say anything important, and then complain because they never say anything important. 

 -- Me --

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The green has nothing to do with this post.  Well, very little.

I intended to go to the country house this week, leaving Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning.  But Tuesday morning The Man asked what my plans were for the week.  He was going to be in NJ on business somewhere toward the end of the week and wanted to set up the schedule so he could visit when I was free.  Naturally I got all excited, and said that my time was flexible, and when could he be here?

Tuesday afternoon, I got the temperature alert for the country house - 98 degrees Wednesday and Thursday.  The a/c is dead there, that's one of those things on the "to fix" list, so my time suddenly became even more flexible.  It would be well over 100 in that house. 

By early afternoon Tuesday, The Man's schedule had changed, too.  No NJ.  He was going to be in Washington, DC, for two days.

So, long story short, I'm in (well, near) DC.  Arrived yesterday, leaving tomorrow.  He's working during the day, but we have the evenings and mornings.

3552 Water, music

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend

will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'."

-- Groucho Marx --

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My phone rang during the dance class last night.  It was a township automated red alert call, saying that the water was contaminated, and we should boil water used to wash dishes etc. and drink bottled water or boiled water until further notice.  A few minutes later Daughter called with the same message, with the additional info that several people had been hospitalized.

I bought some bottled water on the way home.  The store was full of people also buying water.

When I got home I found an email from the township with a link to further info.  They suspect that the contamination occurred from damage to a pipe during construction.

Now, here's the good part.  Right there in the township notice, they say that "the contamination was detected in a water sample taken Friday, June 15."  Note that the alert didn't go out until Monday evening.  People were showing up at the ER over the weekend.  I'm surprised that they admitted a delay.  How does someone break a pipe and not know it?  That leaves them open to a lawsuit claiming that "they should have known - why take samples if you're going to be so blasé about them?"

Gee, thanks anyway for eventually letting us know....

At risk are "infants, toddlers, the elderly, and people with compromised immune systems". 

Given that the Nugget had been drinking it, and given that I drink at least 3 quarts of the stuff a day, I guess I'm not so very elderly, and our letting Nugget eat mud pies and whatever she finds on the floor is good for her immune system.

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I've been reading through old posts, dating from late 2005 or so, and adding labels so I can find stuff.  I found some posts about some of my musical interests. I do love me some drumline action.

This is an Amy/Navy drum battle.  I'm not positive which is which - I suspect the guys on the right are Navy - but the guys on the left won hands down as far as I'm concerned. (Odd that they are not as precise as college drumlines. The guy on the far left is the only one with "the stoic posture".  And why are the guys in the back masked?  Weird.)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFRikZ2Mwao]

I also love bagpipe, uillean pipe, bodhran, and hammered dulcimer.  The old post at http://thesilkentouch.blogspot.com/2007/07/1349-another-passion.html has videos of them.

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I've been disturbed by people who don't know the difference between "lose" and "loose".  Now there's a new one that I'm seeing more and more often:  "break" and "brake".   Even so-called professional writers are screwing that up.  The mental image I get when someone writes "break the car" is, I suspect, not what the writer intended.  "She slammed on the breaks" is a mind-blanker.  I get no image.
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3551 Belated Father's Day

Monday, June 18, 2012

No one raindrop ever feels responsible for the flood.

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I went to http://www.myphotostitch.com/Make_Pattern/Make_Pattern.html, submitted the following photo, and printed out the resulting free cross stitch pattern. Maybe I'll get it done by 2014.

 

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3550 Mystery visitor

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Stop dwelling on your childhood and embrace your adulthood. Growing up is becoming the person you wanted to be.

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 For a while now, perhaps a week or two, this blog has been heavily visited by someone(s) in or near Washington, DC.  Whoever it is, they are not the usual visitor.  Feedjit shows them visiting the latest six or so posts in quick succession, every day, sometimes several times a day.  Feedjit also shows where the link is that they came in on - like I know when someone comes in through a Google search, through Google reader, a link in an email, or via a link in another blog or website. 

This visitor will visit five or six posts in less than a minute, and each visit is coming from a different site - and none of those sites have a link to this blog!  In other words, the link origin is faked, and I suspect the "Washington, DC" may be faked, too.

At first I thought it was someone who didn't want me to know who they were, so they were using a proxy.  Now I think it may be a spam robot.  (There's a (very) remote possibility it could be my own government, triggered by my links to middle eastern blogs and that I read a lot of middle eastern news reports and comment on foreign blogs and reports, but that's just paranoia.)

I'm half tempted to take word verification off.  If it's a spam robot, it'll show its colors immediately.

This is reminiscent of a few years ago when I was getting a lot of visits from Fort Meade, near Washington.  I'd heard, when I lived in that area, that Fort Mead is full of spies.  I asked in the blog "Who's coming in from Fort Meade?", and the visits immediately stopped.  Strange. 

Anyone else seeing anything like this?
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