I’ve been using Firefox exclusively, and I hate what IE does when I run it so much that I haven’t been bothering to check my templates for IE backwards-compatibility.
Which means I didn’t even know until just now that several of my WordPress templates render improperly in IE!
Why didn’t anybody tell me! Ack! I feel like the worst webmistress ever. I’ll be running this teal style until I get time to make my other styles work in Internet Exploder.
When I drive to work in the morning, this is what I look at.
Miles and miles of green Iowa farmland.
I suppose it’s idyllic, but I’ve lived out in the country long enough that I have to deliberately enjoy my surroundings to notice them at all.
Below is the stop sign at the end of my gravel road where it intersects with Hwy 34. That’s about a thousand acres of corn there on the far side of the blacktop.
This morning was gorgeous. The sky was clear and blue, the air wasn’t 110 degrees, everything looked green and lush.
The rain yesterday and last night really, really helped. I actually used a light blanket last night, and turned off the A/C for the first time in many days. (I like a hot day just fine, but when it’s over a hundred Nature’s just showing off. I don’t think it’s funny when stuff in my car melts in the time it takes me to get home from the grocery store.)
I drive past several thousand acres of feed corn and soybeans every day. My house sits in the bottom of a U-shape of cropland; this year they’re growing mostly feed corn on all the surrounding acreage. Sometimes it’s soybeans. It means we’re not very close to our nearest neighbor, and on corn years it means Brett and I say “Knee high by the fourth of July!” to each other at least once, and we’re not even farmers.
On bean years, I stop and eat some on the way to swimming in the triangle pond and think about picking and blanching some for a nice edamame snack. (I never get around to it, and eat all my edamame at sushi restaurants.)
Another way of putting it is that we live right in the middle of where they grow the millions of bushels of feed corn needed to feed to the pigs that become your breakfast bacon, and I test our ponds and well water every year or two for fertilizer and pesticides.
But it’s quiet, and we can see millions of stars at night.
All in all, a pleasant drive to work this morning with the blue sky and the windows down and the breeze and the rain-washed smells. Not a lot of things better than the morning after a cooling summer rain.
P.S. I love my camera phone. Ho-ly SHIT, people. It takes crappy low-res pictures, but it’s so fun.
Last year, my home box would stall and go to a blue screen that bitched about its core dump status, which was ‘interesting’ enough.
But now the box hard boots itself at random intervals, at least once a day. (Yes, I’m running AC. I thought it was a heat problem too.) It’s so exciting when you’re in the middle of something and the box clicks and starts running boot screens!
I’m so close to buying that Mac mini I can practically taste it.
There is a clutch of baby chicks living in the air conditioner in our bedroom window.
Why birds would decide to lay eggs in a window unit AC is beyond me, but the babies have been cheeping their little hearts out for two days now.
And yes, the unit has been running 24/7 since Brett put it in the window, and before that it was inside the house. Which means Ma & Pa Bird built their nest in a running AC unit.
Isn’t nature weird?
Hattie came out Sunday to visit. She’s so cool. We hung out and admired my felted lamb, talked and talked and talked, and drank half a bottle of wine. I also fed her dinner, since she was still there at dinner time and her curiosity about the Pepsi pot roast got the better of her.
Once when I was enjoying an after-work cocktail at the Dew Drop, Dixie, who can cook, told me that the secret to crock pot pot roasts was Pepsi. I made noises of disbelief, and then she and a few other folk like Harry Balls declared their love for the Pepsi pot roast. Naturally I had to find a recipe on the Internet.
I finally took the plunge and made one Sunday for Mr. Brett. The ingredients are terrifying: a 3-4 lb. pot roast, a 12-oz. Pepsi, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a packet of onion soup mix. Could it be any more white trash? I mixed the soups and Pepsi together, then put the meat in it and turned the crock pot on low and left it to its own devices for a few hours because frankly, the whole idea was grossing me out. Later I threw in chopped onion, celery, and carrots per the recipe, and was surprized that it no longer smelled disgusting but seemed to have taken on some of the qualities of edible food.
Around six thirty I baked biscuits and tossed a quick green salad and we sat to eat. Halfway through the meal, Hattie annouced, “There’s something to this Pepsi thing,” and grinned at me. Mr. Brett was too busy eating to even say anything. I guess Pepsi pot roast really is edible after all.
Lord knows I’ll never eat one, but Mr. Brett and Hattie seemed pleased with their Sunday dinner. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with having an arsenal of extraordinarily quick and easy crock pot recipes around! It really makes you feel like a real farm wife to serve up things like pot roasts and biscuits, but in reality a meal like that only takes about fifteen minutes. Shhh, don’t tell Mr. Brett.
Remember the Briefcase function on Windows 95 that would synchronize the contents of a folder? It was handy if you had a file you wanted to maintain on more than one computer.
Now there’s FolderShare.com – file sync, folder syncing, file transfer, share files, web download, access files anywhere.
It’s close to what I want, but it’s not quite Briefcase. I wanna keep files on a thumbdrive and have them automatically synched on my work and home machines! Waah!
Yesterday I napped. A lot. (Why must I have yet another fucking cold?) I also waxed the kitchen floor, and it looks pretty cool. I still have never cleaned the top of the fridge, and we’ve lived there for four years. (The way I figure, if something’s above my head and I can’t see it, it doesn’t really need to be cleaned.)
Brett went to town in the late morning and didn’t come back for hours; when he did, he had Bo and Joe in tow.
We went to the demolition derby to watch Jimbo run. (I missed it because I was off buying funnel cakes, but apparently Jimbo took the hardest hit of the event – a rear ender that was so hard his glasses actually flew off his face.) Jimbo’s little brother, who derbys every year and even went so far this year as to rebuild his engine, was DQ’d for hitting another’s driver side door.
Joe sat with me and finished off my funnel cake with me. I love Joe. His hair is doing marvelous things these days; it’s all unruly and slightly dreaded. He’s got great hair. (He’s playing next Saturday night at Backroads; y’all should be there as drunk and belligerent as you’re capable of being.)
I only watched a few of the demo heats. Once you’ve seen cars smash into each other on mud, you’ve seen cars smash into each other on mud. I ended up in the jeep reading sci-fi on my PPC before the night was through. I had a good time, though. I mean, FUNNEL CAKES, hello!
Remember that tree that fell on one of Brett’s trucks during a recent storm?
Well, now it’s bark dust. The branches, anyway. The trunk is now firewood.
Brett rented a chipper from 1-Stop yesterday, and I helped him shove enough wood through it to fill the entire back of his full-sized pickup’s bed.
That is ONE. SCARY. MACHINE. Talk about a nice way to get rid of the evidence! I mean, if you were stupid enough to get your hand caught in the thing, it would suck your entire arm though in nanoseconds, and it would be gone. Just gone. You could totally kill people and grind ’em up in that thing, no problem.
I’m not afraid of rodents nor of spiders, but that chipper scared the hell out of me. Good God.
Yet, it does make really nice bark dust.
Since my phone hasn’t been holding a charge for more than three hours at a time, and Brett’s has been rather sketchy in the functioning department for lo these many moons now, we stopped by the kiosk at Walmart in Ottumwa today and got new phones.
It took well over an hour.
You can get Lasik surgery in less time than it takes to re-up your freaking wireless contract, fer chrissakes. Why can’t they scan the box, scan your driver’s license, activate the damn phones and take your money? Why is it that as soon as you select a phone and a plan, the clerk glazes over in a hell of never-ending paperwork? It’s not rocket science, it’s selling phones.
We got LG VX6100 phones, the US Cellular version with no sliding lens cover, and we’re pretty happy with them. They’re cute as hell. They have speaker phone capability, Internet access, and built-in digital cameras. (Brett keeps trying to get me to let him take a picture of my boobs, but I ain’t going for it. No way, no how.)
They didn’t have the proper cable to transfer my phone book from my old phone to my new one, so I’ll have to transfer them all by hand. They could have transferred Brett’s numbers, but he didn’t have his old phone with him so he opted to move his himself rather than drive back to Ottumwa. I had no sympathy for him whatsoever when he whined, “Isn’t there an easier way to do this?”
Brett took a chainsaw to the tree that crushed his old Ford. Now he wants to know if I’ll run the chipper, if he goes to 1-Stop to rent one. Run the chipper? I HAVE STREP THROAT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. I’m going to take a nap. He’ll probably have forgotten he even wanted to do it by the time I wake up.
Amma is coming to Mt. Pleasant next week, so people in the satsang have left messages that they need me to do things – edit this web site or that one, fix data in the seva database, be places…. I’d better get my nap in and get my ass to town this evening. Hopefully this chipping scenario will just go away on its own. I’m still tired. From the strep. Yeah, from the strep.
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I’ve migrated my good ol’ blog to WordPress.
Why?
Why not. Seemed like something to do.
Actually, that’s a lie. I did it because WP has more and cooler style templates, and because – unlike MT – it’s free. I’ll probably migrate the whole site to WP since it was so blessedly easy.
Off to play with it to see what it does…
Oh, the original blog still exists here if you should want to view it.
