Photo Hosting problems

My grand idea to host my photos for free isn't working out, so I'll be trying some other ideas for a while; in the meantime, some photos and links won't show up. Sorry. In other news, this might alarm you.

(thanks to Dave Barry)

New computer! Exciting pictures!

We got our new computer today! Yayyyy! Here is a photo of my tiny knit jolly roger and the huge collection of acrylic yarn I got yesterday at the thrift shop for $5! Yayy!

Sad/happy news

My friends' dad died. Early this morning. It is sad because everyone will miss him so, but happy because he was not even close to having any fun anymore. He didn't suffer long, and not at all at the end. He asked to be cremated and for his funeral to be on a Saturday, at least one week from the day he died, so that everyone would be able to come without upsetting their lives too much. That's the kind of guy he was. It also gives his family time to regroup and to plan the kind of sendoff they want to give him. This way they have more than a week to plan a really special bash, and get everything exactly as they want it. I think that's really great, and I plan to incorporate it into my funereal plans.

Evil fire escape as boring as old, nice fire escape.

Apparently, even I can get sick of looking around for worse and worse horrifying explicit pornography, so the evil fire escape will just take you to something evil from now until I get my horrifying explicit pornography surfing second wind. In other news, the computer guy worked on our new computer today to take his mind off of the below terrible stuff. And, I went out to Bonnie's Barnyard to visit a miniature horse colt that was born this very afternoon. It was cool. And a mini donkey named Charley tried to get into my lap for a nap. It is very cute when Bonnie goes and gets a baby donkey and holds it in her lap for a few minutes, but Charley is full grown, and bites. And was sporting a chubby. So that was a little uncomfortable. "Dude, I'm sorry. It's not you. It's me. I just don't feel that way about you. At all." People look at you funny when you talk to donkeys that way. Even if they're your mom.

Sometimes stuff sucks and you can't do anything about it.

I'm sure all my faithful readers remember that my mom's friend Rosemary, whose dad is dying, and our computer guy, whose dad is dying, are siblings. Mom is out at Rosie's house right now, trying to help with the stupid peripheral things that come up so none of the family would have to leave, because they think today might be the day. The dear guy is drifting away, and I can't put into strong enough words how good he is, how strong and wonderful. His family is terrific people too, and they are handling all this with so much grace and strength I can't fathom it. I feel so bad for all of them. I wish I could do something, but I can't, so I think I'll just go bang my head against the stove until I feel like taking a little nap.

Fucking Shitdicks

Hey, I actually have something to say today. I was doing my daily webcrawl and when I got to Defective Yeti he had posted about some stuff that pissed me off. He was on NPR's The Works to talk about blogs, and a lot of the stuff he talked about (as always) was both engrossing and amusing. But if you happen to click over there, the middle topic is "comments spam," and it is pissing me off. Not the way he wrote or spoke about it, but the fact of it. Jeez. There's a Wired Magazine article about it that mentions several people it has happened to, including Wil Wheaton (I swear I'm not obsessed, he's just everywhere online) where someone spammed his comments board for a post about his fear that his sick cat would die with links to an extremely legally objectionable pornography site. Which just makes me sick. And if I understood the Wired article right, the only real objective of sending out spambots to do this is to get whatever site mentioned on the most websites, whether or not anyone clicks on the link, so that whatever overseas pharmacy or porn farm or whatever gets to fool search engines into thinking it's really popular. Which also degrades the quality of returns that you or I get when using a search engine. That's just shitty, folks. I mean, I'm in no danger of it here in my little corner of the internet, as it seems to be targeted specifically to very popular blogs and web-phenomenon type sites. But I happen to love to read several of them, and anything that hurts them, therefore endangering my amusement and edification (besides being totally morally reprehensible and worthy of a quick rap to the nads for whoever thought it up) makes me really mad.

Ahhh, summer!

What a lovely day I've had. I've finished all but two of the books I've had out of the library, am down to the boring one I've tried to read in between each of the other 15 really interesting ones, and the sociological study of Amish culture. Strangely enough, these are two seperate books. The boring one is just an uninspired story about flat, uninteresting characters. I won't name the book or author, so's not to embarrass anyone, but it's called Sort of Rich by James Wilcox. Just terrible. It's like he's trying to write a book by Larry McMurtry, only the way McMurtry'd do it if he was in a coma. And was a terrible writer. Plus it seems like the author hates each and every character (for which, I don't blame him) and the reader too. Uhgh. The text on the Amish is still dragging because I'm still in the beginning where the author is explaining what he's changed since the last edition and defining his terms so you understand in what ways he means the Amish are a folk culture and in which ways they deviate from one. The only thing about reading about the Amish, a cultural group I've long admired, is that approximately every page and a half I have to put the book down and do something absolutely filthy. Drink a beer, leer at a teenaged boy, tweak my own nipple, it's terrible. The Amish are corrupting me! Help! This morning I read 6 pages without stopping and I had to throw the book on the couch and knit a Jolly Roger Flag. It turned out great. I used the yarn I dyed the other day for the field and a pure white for the skull and bones. Picture soon to follow, as if you believed me any more. As god is my witness, I WILL post pictures one day. It's just that the new computer is ordered, but it keeps getting delayed, (because our computer guy's dad is in the end stage of terminal cancer and he's just a little preoccupied with assuring his dad's comfort and quality of life in his last weeks on Earth) and it's not worth putting the $40 usb port in the old computer (except maybe it is, I don't know. We're going to keep this one running so I can still check my e-mail even when mom needs to play solitaire for 450 hours straight, and so other people can check their e-mail when I need to edit my blog template for 450 hours straight), and everytime I go somewhere where maybe I can save the pics to disk, something terrible happens. So screw it. I could have took the damn camera to Walmart or somewhere and had them put on a cd by now, for like 9 bucks. Jeez. Well, I did submit to doing it my mom's way, so I don't know why I'm surprised I've had the camera this long and still can't post fricking pictures to my blog. I even figured out how to host them without paying a million dollars. I just can't get them out of the damn camera. Oh, well.
Forget that. After I knitted the flag and read a little, I went to drink beer and mow the back lawn, which was fun (I know, that's nuts), until I ran over the cord anyway (it's an electric mower, which is why it's fun, that and the beer) because everyone in the house came out to "see if I needed help" (read: stand around looking at me and unnerve me to the point that I ran over the cord). So then I went to my room while they fixed the cord, and I drank more beer, and me and mom took Dad out to eat chicken fried steak for his birthday. We walked down to the diner, three blocks, and back, and it was fun. Overall, a good day. Mmmmm.