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July 28, 2005
he did not take the open window
In a conversation with Deb last night, I found that apparently there have always been an abundance of bats in this house. She and her family would gather at dusk in the summer to watch the bats fly from the attic.
The bat that bothered us two nights ago did not take the open window out. He was back again last night. This time he flew around the upstairs hall and then flew downstairs. Brian followed him; I stayed in bed. I listened:
Whump. Whump. "Sh*t!" Thump. "Auugh!"
B came up every so often to give me the latest: "He's in the bathroom." or "I can't get him--he's too quick." He must have tired the bat out in the chase, because finally he hung himself in his upside-down batwardly fashion on the shower curtain, and B was able to slide him into a big empty clear-plastic pretzel barrel.
He brought him upstairs to show me, and the thing looked like a frightened field mouse. Sooo small and hardly harmless. He took him outside and let him go.
While we ran this morning, Deb said, "You know, he'll just come back in." Well, B is a season bat-catcher now, so I'm not worried.
Posted by mryonker at 07:52 AM | Comments (3)
July 27, 2005
unbearable sadness of laptop
I think my iBook might have died. I had it upstairs last night for late-night weather-checking and blog-reading; Brian used it a bit for some ebay-browsing.
I brought it down stairs this morning to plug it in. The power cord, when plugged in, showed NO LIGHT. I checked the outlet. Fine. Plugged it into another outlet; no orange charge light.
So, I head to school to do some other house-keeping stuff, and stop by G's office and swap power cords.
Now I'm home, and the charging light flickers and flashes (in a kind of rhythm, though I might be imagining it), and then goes out completely.
I have checked, and even though the battery is the right model number for the recall (apparently they've been exploding or something), it is not within the proper series. Though I don't think it has to do with the battery at all (although now the battery is COMPLETELY dead).
Anyway, Brian, in all his electronic and computer prowess, sniffs at the end where the plug goes in. His verdict? Something smells fried.
F&%k. I smell huge repair bill. Because while I *do* back things up, I haven't in a couple weeks, and there is stuff on there THAT I NEED!!
The trusty grape iMac, with the missing /? key (which I have a replacement for...somewhere), will suffice for now.
***
In other (not better or worse) news, B and I were startled awake simultaneously last night, about 4am. Something was bumping around in the bedroom.
A bat, to be exact.
Brian jumped from bed and followed it out until the hall. He shut the kids' door, and promptly hung a large heavy blanket in our doorway (special order door STILL is not in). He opened the hall window.
We did not see it the rest of the night--but yikes anyway.
Yikes.
Posted by mryonker at 06:52 PM | Comments (1)
July 26, 2005
and mustard
...because this post really is the same as the last. Well, same purpose anyway.
Still busy, with no *completed* project to report, but progress on many.
We had the movin' upstairs party this weekend, and as I show friends and neighbors the "finished" rooms, I'm realizing they're NOT finished. Really, only the rock is hung, mudded, and painted in two of 5 rooms. The trim isn't up, the carpets aren't in, and eventually (read: now) we'll need new windows.
But whatever. I have a regular living room and dining room again, and we are less cramped overall. I've got some pics to post, but no time or patience to do them now. We're thinking about camping this weekend, which might be fun for the kids but will be a lot of work for me and B. Actually, a lot of work for B. :) I normally just stand around, eating and drinking. So maybe camping could be fun.
OTT, SOSO.
July is the skinny post month, apparently.
Posted by mryonker at 01:54 PM | Comments (1)
July 20, 2005
my boys, mostly
Slow progress on the upstairs remodel. The first bedroom is wired, sheetrocked, painted. Doors hung. It still needs trim and carpet. The carpet will just have to wait, as we don't have the kizzy for that right yet. The trim will be raw pine (urethaned, of course), and we have it but it ain't up yet.
The second bedroom is now wired and sheetrocked, but needs painted. I'm hoping dear B will finish painting tomorrow for a big weekend move-back-upstairs party. Ooooh. I will sooooo love him for getting us back upstairs!! Did I mention I'm OVER sleeping in my living room??
Jack was stung by something horrific this afternoon. His newest funnest game is throwing a ball onto the garage roof and attempting to catch it on its way down. So he was out with his new pastime, Josh was splashing in our mosquito-incubating wading pool, and I was sitting on the back stoop wishing away some horrible menstrual cramps (I know, I know, overshare--no one's making you read :). All of a sudden, Jack screams bloody murder and comes running willy-nilly through the yard and toward the stoop. Brian comes flying out the back door and we triage him on the steps. Whatever stung him drew a large quivering bead of blood on the cartilage of his ear, near the top. I ran inside to concoct a baking soda paste and when I returned his ear was nearly double in size, I shit not.
And he's still yowling. Jack, and I know I've mentioned this before, is not a crier. He has ground half of his face into hamburger on the driveway in a skateboarding mishap, and barely batted an eye.
It took a bit of calming, and then he decided oh, it didn't hurt that bad. But his ear was (and still is) enormous. And when he got up and was walking around, he kept saying, "Look, ma, how my ear is wobbling and shaking." Apparently the swollen-ness of it made it feel heavy to him. I kept asking, "Is your tongue getting bigger?" and "Are you getting enough breath?" because it got so big, it made me worry about allergies and anaphalactic shock, which I know NOTHING about.
At bedtime tonight we could NOT find a binky and Josh was freaking out. We were all combing the house, and he was following us around calling "Uh-Oooooh. UH-OOOOOH." Finally Brian found one. Man, it is time to lose that thing for good already.
Posted by mryonker at 10:42 PM | Comments (2)
July 19, 2005
ketchup
"Summer Break?" Gimmee a freakin'. Break.
Damn I'm busy. Who ever thought I could have so many projects running at once? But it makes me happy.
I'm getting my purple runner's toes back. I'm sharpening my web design chops. I'm making slow-motion progress on exam stuff. I'm building planning course schedules and syllabi.
:)
Posted by mryonker at 09:11 PM | Comments (0)
July 14, 2005
the day in which I'm made liar
Apparently, I lied to D and A when I told them mid-August was when teaching assignments come in. They came today. [Sorry to scare the crap out of you guys.]
I lied to friend/fellow GS leader tonight when I told him: "Josh is getting a little easier. I don't have to follow him around and dig toys from his mouth anymore." J-baby promptly found some Polly Pocket acoutrement and hid it in his chipmunk cheeks.
I lied to another friend on the phone, whom I told that when Brian is out of town, as he is this week, I tend to be more efficient and productive, as I don't have to worry about, wait for, or fit in his schedule/agenda. Two days he's been gone and the house is still a wreck, I still have to sand and re-mud the second bedroom upstairs, and I'm blogging instead of working on my summer fellowship project. Also, I forgot that: Brian not here = Madeline can't run, and that makes me cranky.
I lied when I told the kids that NO, we could not keep the kitten that Sophie (aka Crack Rock) the stray birthed this weekend. I called *the one* shelter in Oswego County this afternoon and the nice man nearly laughed when I asked did he have room for a mama cat and kitten. Apparently, there's nothing I can do except keep feeding them and hope I can afford to have them fixed before they start popping out more puppies.
Hannah has already named the kitten Sugar, which is a nice name for a kitty, except this kitty is black with small patches of dark tiger stripes. I would've gone with something more edgy. Maybe Keats. We had a brown tiger when I was growing up named Keats. He belonged to a friend of my mom's who had to move, or travel, or something and so we adopted him. I always thought it was a good name, even though the reference was lost on me until, say, a few weeks ago.
Posted by mryonker at 10:03 PM | Comments (4)
July 13, 2005
don't eat over your notes (or, blogs are not a weapon)
Your notes will be a sticky mess of strawberry syrup from the desert.
Last night I had an opportunity to attend a networking banquet for a regional chapter of a national professional association. The banquet's speaker was a local business woman who is a jane-of-many trades: publishing on demand, web developer, women's marketing consultant. She also runs workshops for businesses who would like to implement blogs to ramp up profits and visibility. Her presentation was a kind of primer for "how blogs can help your business."
To be fair, her presentation was directed at entrepeneurs who have little or no experience with blogging, so the discussion was a little "thin." But it was certainly thought-provoking for me, on several levels:
The first: a good deal of time was spent making the distinction between a regular web site and a blog. The speaker's claim was that it was the commenting function that made a blog what it was, and I don't think I completely disagree; although, I don't think it's the simple function in and of itself that makes a blog. It's what results *from* a series of connected comments. It's the fact that a blog doesn't exist as a single entity in one place: coments result in posts elsewhere, result in trackbacks, result in comments, etc etc. It's almost as though the blog isn't the "place" itself (ie, the URL where the blog lives), but instead the blog is the network, IS the many connected comments and posts. She described the blog as a "thin" web site, which I do think I disagree with. I would actually call a blog "thick," simply because the ways that the posts become archives, the way content is updated fairly frequently. the ways author(s) are present and accountable. It could be, however, that I don't understand what she meant by "thin."
The second: This presentation made clear to me an issue that I've been grappling with ever since I picked up Hugh Hewitt's book. Blogs for business?? Wha? The idea had never been quite right to me, and last night I started to realize why. So many of the values that blogging embodies: sharing, honesty, full disclosure, unabashed subjectivity, etc do not mix with commercialism. Marketing is about creating a well-crafted, engineered lack that people will want to fill. Marketing is about phrases like "virtually spotless" and "helps treat jock itch." Networking with and linking to competitors? Allowing open comments so consumers can offer feedback, good and ugly? Will blogs change the business model, or will businesses simply change blogs to fit the traditional, competitve model?
The third: Maybe I'm slow. OK, I am slow. But Derek mentioned to me last year, as I naively offered him some quotes from Rebecca Blood's book _You've Got Blog_, that writing and publishing codex ABOUT blogs was not quite right to him. Last night's speaker was adamant that people still want to "have that thing they can hold in their hand," that books will still sell (and her being a publisher, I can understand her push for that claim to be true). You can't learn to blog by reading a book about it. And a blog is not a thing you can hold in your hand, really. A blog is really nothing like a book at all. They both use text, the written word, and that, I think, is the only real similarity.
In all, the presentation was slightly uncomfortable for me. It was quite like looking at someone from an older generation, your grandmother, maybe (though this woman was by no means "old"), trying to fit into some waist-hugging jeans and sporting a belly-button ring, and trying to convince others of that same generation that she really did look cool and that they would look cool, too, if they would just adopt this happenin' fashion.
But you can't fake a blog. Small steps in the beginning, you know? Self-awareness. Asking for help, admitting to mistakes or when you really don't know what you're talking about. Saying "I don't know" when you field a question that you DON'T KNOW the answer to. Then getting better, more savvy, messing with your templates, a new banner, whatever, but never losing sight of the fact that there are always people who know a little more, can take it a little farther, can be a little better--and being cool with that.
Business doesn't tip its hat. It doesn't admit mistakes unless ordered by court; it isn't gracious. It's cutthroat. The speaker said last night that blogs generate a datamine of/about potentinal customers--that blogs could be "the biggest tool in the coroporate arsenal." Look. My blog is not a weapon, and I especially don't want it used as a weapon AGAINST me.
Of course, what I hope for is that blogs will change business--make them more accountable for claims and actions. And I think that the relationship between blogs and business will shape up as a unit in my WRT 302 Digital Writing course in the fall, where one of the underlying research questions will be "Do (and if so how) writing technologies transform cultural values and practices?"
A similar inquiry could probably serve a WRT 307 Professional Writing as well.
Posted by mryonker at 10:34 AM | Comments (3)
comments fixed!
A week or so ago, I was getting crazy bombarded with Trackback spam, and when I would de-spam with Blacklist, I would get an error message that I didn't understand, and so I assumed the de-spam wasn't taking. So I went into IP banning and pasted the IP address from which the spam came.
The spam stopped.
Nothing I tried to fix the comments was working, so I went in and deleted the banned IP address. Now comments work again.
Comment away!
Posted by mryonker at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2005
MT Problem
Hi everyone.
My luverly mom just emailed me to let me know she was blocked from commenting here. Lo and behold, somehow ALL commenting is being blocked, even though I have them open for individual entries and the weblog is configured for comments to be unmoderated (except for older entries).
Any ideas?
Posted by mryonker at 09:56 AM | Comments (1)
July 11, 2005
no sense (in two acts)
ACT ONE:
Bad night last night. Woke to hellacious upper GI pain, reminiscent of gall stone pain. [For those among you who are not acquainted with gall stone attacks: count yourself lucky. Having gall stones is like having many many excruciating, looooong heart attacks, which SHOULD end in death, but instead of ending, simply KEEP HURTING.] Heartburn (more appropriately described as heartSTAB or will-you-please-stop-chopping-my heart-with-that-ice-pick-PLEASE) along with symmetric back pain. I propped myself up in the couch and did some deep breathing. Slept intermittently.
Woke this morning with residual burn, not as intense. I took the kids to swim lessons and sat on the pool deck wishing I had NEVER eaten whatever it was that had put me in such a state.
And then I remembered.
Good Sense. The anti-diarrheal. Which had done SUCH magic keeping my waste inside of me that now my waste was crawling back up into my stomach. Or something.
I spent the rest of the day drinking water and nibbling small fibrous snacks, like prunes and raisins.
ACT TWO:
[flashback]
I stand at the counter yesterday afternoon, pre-agony, chopping green onions for a fabulous black bean salsa, the recipe for which I ganked from a friend-of-a-friend at the 4th festivities. [hm. maybe Good Sense + too much salsa = miserable night??] Brian comes in.
B: Do we have any iodine?
Me: Uh, no. Bactine, hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, Neosporin. What do you need iodine for?
B: You don't wanna know.
Now. He's absolutely right; I don't want to know. Brian is the kind of man who you DON'T want rubbing aloe onto your sunburnt back. His hands are thick, calloused mitts of steele. He is constantly cutting, abrading, puncturing, tearing, etc, them, and rarely bats an eye. When he does come looking for a band-aid, he usually ends up needing stitches. When we lived in VA, he dropped a transmission and engine onto his hand (middle finger, to be exact) and cut it open so wide and deeply that the bone was quite visible. A few years back here in NY, he had a nail and the tips of several fingers peeled off when his hand slipped into a boat engine.
I look to his hands, and neither is wrapped in his T shirt or some other random blood catching medium, and I relax.
Me: What do you need it for?
B: It's kinda gross.
Me: [Thinking that he's due for a trip to the emergency room, since he hasn't been in a year or so, and he MUST MISS GOING or something] Just TELL ME.
He peels off the sock of his left foot to reveal a triangular puncture, about a centimeter wide, on the instep. He wiggles his toe: I see (thankfully operable) connective tissue contract and release.
The room spins.
Me: Uuuuuuuh. How'd you do that?
After much cajoling, he describes the scene: He had been working on the upstairs remodel, prepping a doorway to hang a door. The existing doorways upstairs are all crooked and are strangely configured (no conventional door measurements in 1892, apparently). We're special ordering most of them, but this particular doorway was CLOSE, so he was up there with the SAWZALL, shaving a 100-year-old rough cut 2 by 4 to make a standard door fit. He's cutting in a downward motion, ostensibly AWAY from his body. And near the end, the sawzall unexpectedly, swiftly, cuts out from the 2 by 4 and chops right into the top of his shoe. edited to add: "10-inch blade, still running," Brian reminds me, after making sure I didn't make him sound like an inbred redneck.
Ouch.
So, he dresses his wound (I can't, I'm swooning) and returns to finish hanging the door. And then, several hours later, he decides he's going to get stitched because it won't quit oozing blood and soaking many many gauze pads.
He won't let me take a picture of it for the blog, I don't think. Maybe when he's sleeping...
Posted by mryonker at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)
July 10, 2005
good sense
What. A. Day.
445 am the alarm goes off for a 515 departure time: it's off to Utica for the Boilermaker. I drive the 20 yards to Deb's house in the wrong lane, halfway on the sidewalk. But no one's up this early on a Sunday.
630 we arrive in sunny Utica (or, Ackuhtoo, as Deb keeps calling it--apparently an inside joke that I'm not inside). We have to turn around only once before finding a decent parking space near the shuttle.
645 Deb passes me a flask-looking bottle. "Good Sense" is, apparently, an off-brand anti-diarrheal, and she swigs it like a wino. She says, "Don't look at the expiration date. Just chug." It is VILE and while I feel quite tight in the bowel, my stomach threatens rebellion.
650 I munch some trailmix on the shuttle to the starting line. I pray the nuts will soak up some of the poison Deb has just poisoned me with.
700 We pick up our numbers and chips and stand in line for the port-a-johns. Many men pee against just about anything that will stand still: electric posts, bushes, trash cans. While in line, we read through the info packets. We find that our bibs are color-coded based on our seed time. We immediately begin looking around to see what other colors there are, and try to guess which color means what. Green and bright yellow appear to be "fast" seeds, as those who sport them are exceedingly fit. Our color, light blue, is worn by all shapes and sizes, though none of them looks exceedingly fit. We also decide that "if" we get separated, we will meet at the McDonald's Parfait table at the post race party.
715 We find our way to our seed corral: it is at the very end of the pack (though neither of us is surprised). We chat with various runners, joke about being slower than bread mold, and begin to realize the magnitude of this particular race.
800 The gun.
808 We finally make it to the starting line. I work very hard not to get kicked in the knees by the runners in front of me.
818 The first mile. There are still people, runners, everywhere around us. A runner stumbles in front of us, taking several runners down with him. I want to look back to see how long it will be for the pack to pull ahead and leave us, but I fear that if I look back I'll trip someone. Deb and I pull off the street and take to the sidewalk, which is considerably less crowded.
830 I tell Deb I'm going back into the street so's not to miss a water station. I have to navigate through the thick line of specators, and by the time I'm back on the street, I've lost her.
845 There are people having tailgate parties, drinking beer and roasting burgers on their front lawns. It's 845, people!! Go drink some coffee and read the paper!! Mile 4 is at the top of a very cool hill (not nearly as bad as St. Albert's) that once I crested, I could see the huge crowd of runners both in front of and behind me.
855 Big downhill to mile 5, where at the very bottom was a water station people were slowing down for. I slowed too, again, not get kicked in the kneecaps, and a man behind me put his hands into my back to push me to one side so he could get by. Angry RuDe Man in Ugly Orange Shirt.
900 Popsicle stand!!
910 I pass ARMiUOS. Want to push him but don't have the nerve.
920 Awesome metal band rocks. Moments later: cool hippie Toby Lightman-like chick with acoustic rocks.
928 Holy crap: mile 8 already?? I don't even hurt (bad).
941 Finish :) Smiling.
This race is HUGE. 11,000 people. And except for ARMiUOS, all of them friendly. The post-race party is quite amazing, with more free food goodies than I've ever seen at a road race. Not just dry cold bagels and bananas here. A turkey sandwich lunch bag, cookies, oranges, whole bottles of sports drinks, free beer (lots of it--but I just can't drink that early, or that soon after running). Deb and I found the end of the line to get what we thought would be our T-shirts, but ended up only getting a nice beer glass. No free T with this race. :(
Though I found once I got home that race participants can get them for only $1.50. Not bad.
Official time: 1:33 (10:03 pace). Deb, without me acting as a "governor,": 1:25 (9:13 pace).
Posted by mryonker at 09:51 PM | Comments (0)
July 07, 2005
one arm is just less weight
Megnut posted after a 5K that her boyfriend pointed out how a one-armed man beat her.
I forgot to post that during the 10K I ran a couple weeks ago, a man WITH ONE LEG finished about a half hour sooner than I did.
He had this amazing prosthetic that looked like a strip of springy metal. No pretend leg-look-alike there with a shoe. Just a spring. And no foot pain I bet.
Oh, that was probably insensitive of me.
In other running news: after a week of running the craziest hill in Council Bluffs [kownsa bluss], being home and running flat should be easy. But this morning, as I'm brushing my teeth at 6am, I hear the pitter patter of little feet.
J-baby just keeps getting up earlier--so even though our run is flat-ish here, pushing a 25 pound baby in the jogger is tiring. Maybe not quite as tiring as the St. Albert's hill, but still.
And T-minus three days til the Boilermaker, for which I have finagled TWO friends to accompany me.
Posted by mryonker at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)
July 06, 2005
super flam'n turdOmatic
If you thought I was kidding, I wasn't. The fourth this year was nothing short of, uh, fascinating. We had homemade pyrotechnics, homemade rocket launchers (my dad christened it "La Bomba"), homemade vodka slushies. Lots of fun. A trip to the zoo, a chance to waterski, wheelies on the fourwheeler, and many many many snappers.
The pic of my cousin Dana, above, links to a slideshow--mostly of family pics.
And re my earlier post, in which I claim that "Pregnant Cat" is an actual title for a rocket: I was wrong. Apparently, the Pregnant Cat was affectionately named by my aunt Linda after the way it appears to have many nipples, like a pregnant cat would. It has nothing to do with the wheezing whine it emits once it's lit (which is why I thought they called it Pregnant Cat). But that's not its real name, anyway. And no, I don't know its real name. But regardless, it SOUNDS like a pregnant cat; or, more precisely, a cat in labor.
Good times.
Posted by mryonker at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)