Month: September 2004

how-to: ethernet cables — the fun part was working around a very fascinated kitten. (at this point, still the no-name kitten.)

the new site is up…now I want a nap.

I think bachelor chow is actually cocoa rice krispies.

not that y’all are reading this from Olympia, but if you are, keep an eye out for the little guy. if not, just keep your fingers crossed for us.

and then the signs started melting in the rain, and C went to the animal shelter, and Boingo wasn’t there, but a tiny grey kitten was…. she comes home tomorrow. maybe, like couples who adopt only to get pregnant, he’ll come home now.

update 2: he wandered home yesterday afternoon. C called me while I was in my vanpool to let me know. he slept in our room last night! and he remains cute and fluffy and friendly, tho he was quite eager to go outside again this morning. of course, we are still getting the grey kitten. yipes…we are now officially crazy cat people. (oh, and I changed the picture so it doesn’t have our address & phone. not that they’re not in the phone book, but still.

I just installed post2mail, which should send me an email with a link to this post. if it works, I’ll do these 2 things:

1) make it easier to update the list of recipients (I sort of like the way it’s done in Update Notify)
2) make it only send from a single category
3) ideally, send the actual post contents, instead of a link (or in addition to, I suppose)

okay, so it does send the actual contents; amend that to sending HTML mail. I think.

wow, I’m dumb. it’s just a configuration option.

only it doesn’t convert the line breaks. why not? and what about images?

just tweaking.

I’m in a ridiculously good mood. 🙂

yesterday afternoon the universe gave me an early birthday present. I went for a bike ride out to Lowes and back, and on the way back, in front of the VFW hall on Martin Way, I found a $20 bill…saw the flash of green out of the corner of my eye, stopped, and there it was.

I was thinking I’d save it for my birthday dinner tonight, but when I got home, two friends were at the house and talking about D&D with C…so instead I bought pizza for the gang and we gamed (the 4 of us, plus J’s wife) all evening. much slaying of goblins and bugbears. 🙂

this morning I brought in a bouquet of flowers from the garden: cosmos, mostly, with a few of the 2nd round of wildflowers. that, really, is my birthday gift to myself, not the shoes I’ll probably buy tonight, nor the jewelry piece I want to try over the weekend, but this pretty little thing that makes me smile when I see it next to my monitor, and which represents the serendipity that I’ve found in growing things.

…and my department had decorated my office. 2 days ago, our dept. assistant turned 50, and they went absolutely nuts. black streamers & balloons, signs everywhere, weird gag gifts, etc. I got pink streamers, signs that say “Elaine is 30!” and a big bow on my monitor. I’m wearing my hair sticks today, so of course as soon as I walked in, I got all tangled up in the streamers. 🙂 and it feels like a sweet thing, a happy thing. (pictures to follow)

honestly, it reminds me of the silly office/birthday pranks that used to happen at UWPC, esp. when “Tom”:http://humantail.com was still there. (the time we filled Dan’s cube with shredded paper and made buttons that said “Dan Appreciation Day” when he complained about not getting recognized on Assistant’s Day stands out, as does the time they filled Tom’s cube with balloons and decorated it like a English cottage, complete with tea kettle and embroidered curtains.)

yesterday I also had what feels like a very important breakthrough with therapy, too. it’ll take good followup work on my part, but even that feels *right* somehow. and this morning, on the van, I had a lovely writing moment, working on Aila’s tale, which hasn’t happened in a really, really long time.

so, yeah.

tonight? if Sears still carries those shoes I got last year, I’ll buy a pair when I get off work. then dinner at Mini Saigon, and maybe one of our Netflix movies, and that will be a lovely birthday.

the rest of the birthday went lovely well. lunch out with those few who were at work, a new pair of shoes, take-out Thai, and possibly the strangest/cool movie I’ve seen all year. (a Chinese historical fantasy action mystery?)

this will be coming to you in the mail shortly:

(today is my little sister’s 24th birthday.)

I’m getting better at making lists, but only a little better at following them.

I still feel like an empty shell around which this life has accreted.

and, wow, does that sound pretentious.

posting by email with WordPress is not a piece of cake, not even remotely. (and that’s not even dealing with the really obnoxious problem: whether I’d be able to set up a dummy email account at all at work.)

I’ve deleted all my test posts, just because they’re fabulously ugly.

the problem is, I’m looking to combine two Blogger blogs from work into a single WP blog, adding another feature as part of the new thing, and the main user of one of the existing blogs does 99.9% of her posting by email, because it works with the rest of her workflow.

and the whole point of doing all this is to make it easier for her….

so.

1) it has to work with rich text from Outlook.
2) it has to work with images.
3) it has to look like a normal email, no quirky formatting (she sends these emails to real human beings, too).
4) it has to be utterly transparent.

whew. we’ll see if it can be done.

This morning, as we (the vanpool) were driving up the Steilacoom-DuPont Road, we saw the army guys out on the shooting range, with a big group of them sitting in a circle…

it looked like they were playing “duck duck goose.”