Let's play

Hunting up and down for a baby picture with a shark, like you do. Got a snip off a vid. Hoping the one we really want got backed up off my old phone onto @bonenado's computer. Amazing how the one pic we'd actually go back for is the scarcest one to be found anywhere, which is ridiculous since I've been all over social media and Sharknado since it first happened.

Checking on my top 5 playlists for the month, so far popularity is in this order. It's kind of a big deal since youtube playlists are still pulling in nearly 25% of my klout score, and I make it an experiment by watching the difference between searchable playlists and linking protected playlists so that they're only played if I source them out.

gaga- protected, mashups
aspienado- public, with specific description
joker/oswald- protected, kinda psycho
z- protected, pure Benedict luvs for God knows why
vp- protected, Vanessa Paradis

Since old lappy is still in the redzone for nuclear meltdown, I avoid running playlists on it, especially if I'm trying to do other things, so webtime minutes come from other people- for this month, across 9 countries, biggest day was January 3rd. If I ever have any doubts about some of the numbers being me running the playlists while I'm working out or doing chores, the "z" list has the longest web only watch time, and since that is one playlist I definitely don't waste my web time on (Ben's face floating around doesn't do it for me, and I can't sit that long, anyway), that one is my control list. It's both protected and unwatched on the webs by me, so the ONLY way it's pulling webwatch stats is me linking it out. Also, I have other searchable lists, and watched my LadyGaGa list suddenly pop in a few countries during the Golden Globe Awards, but it's interesting that my shared protected lists got more views overall for the month. I link, people click. It's called driving traffic.

And this is how Pinky plays with statistics. Not that it really matters for me personally, but some of you out there take klout pretty seriously. I keep getting added to klout lists.

Have spent a little time learning how to split like a photon and be in two places at once again. Been a long time since I've been both underground and public. Back then it was all about myspace and forums. Now it's all about facebook and twitter. And G+ and youtube and linkedin and pinterest and instagram and...etc. I'm spread pretty thin. Still getting my workouts in and keeping up with chores around the house, which is fantastic this time of year, but I've been airing out my brain and steeling my will for a really big plunge back into grind writing, where I barely come up for air and forget to eat for hours.

Yes, I see the checking back every day for the Mantrid post. Love you guys, I know I super suck (going on 3 months now), but I've been scraping my soul back off a rock and reconnecting with my muse.

Remember what I said about losing.

recoup recap

Highlights from this week, in no particular order of circumstance or significance.

 After 105 days without chocolate of any kind, I finally ate 5 chocolate chips yesterday. I was thrilled not to have any kind of reaction.

 Score for the ultimate compliment. "Ok someone over there is an over achiever"   This collage sums up nicely. It wasn't me, I swear.

But this was. I'm an enabler- this is basically the kind of stuff that happens when I uninstall twitter off my phone for a week. I stop moving the camera around at about 2 minutes. Elfnado is deceptively cooperative here, thanks to a long nap.

 Meanwhile, we declared the Houston gang the Christmas tree winner. Such bravery putting that up with a zurrito around.

 They made cookies, too. Papa zurrito made a beach babe.

 In spite of all the revelry, I didn't put on a single pound and ate only 4 cookies the entire week. My blood sugar readings were all fantastic because I super pushed proteins, which I think got me through a whole week of high energy Elfnado without crashing into total flare up or succumbing to sinus and ear infections. I also made old people super food on Christmas Eve to power up the grampa- the yummiest broccoli-cauliflower cheese soup ever, with bacon and a big load of onion powder. I'm pretty sure eating an entire head of cauliflower and two giant bunches of broccoli between us gave us super powers.

 All the same, I'm looking forward to some rest this next week as the temps plunge. I'm pretty sure I'll be pathetic on the couch with the DVR for a couple of days. Speaking of DVR, we watched how Minty started the tradition of hanging stockings. Kudos to parents out there who sit through lots of little pony shows, lol. I don't handle those high squeaky voices very well.

 Zurrito Claus... Might hafta find that kid some coal gum to chew next year.

 Miss Elfnado kept putting toes over the naughty line herself. If she's not the boss, no one is, but grampa is used to that because of her mama.

You know I got sox for Christmas.

And you know I gave sox.

@bonenado outcooled me when he got Elfnado her first sonic screwdriver. You press the button and whirly lights go off, we all walked around going zrrr zrrr zrrr all over that button.

This is super long and I'm super tired. Going to hold off putting twitter back on my phone until I get a little more caught up, hopefully back on track by Monday. Hope everyone had nice holidays, counting down now to 2015!

shoe coasters and pie

This.

Scott is one of those compulsive neat freaks that rearranges the basement every little bit. Our walk in closet is spotless. I've been teasing him for years about needing shoe coasters because I keep finding his shoes on top of mine, and it doesn't matter how muddy or grungy his shoes are, they wind up stacked neatly on top of my dress shoes and very expensive asics gels every time he unconsciously 'straightens'. I like neatly lining my shoes up, but I often scatter them into different areas of the house so they can catch a break and remain stack-free. I'm so used to this now it doesn't bother me, but the slippers caught my eye yesterday and cracked me up. Whole big bedroom, lots of empty floor in there...

This is what I'm talking about in fantasy baseball. Nobody has figured out yet who Joe Namath's Coat is, and he's stomping robot butt. 

I'm nearing the end of the prednisone taper, 3 more days and hopefully I'm done. I conked for half an hour last night and then suddenly was wide awake again for several hours. I tried everything, but the only thing that finally got me nodding off again was, weirdly, a cup of coffee (at midnight) and getting into the aged gouda I picked up yesterday. If you have never tried aged gouda, it's totally worth it, even at $20 a pound. 

I'm also trying new coffee from a local gourmet roaster in Eureka Springs (also known as "Little Switzerland in the Ozarks"), click this logo to check out their site. I ground the beans fresh myself yesterday at Mama Jean's (I got the breakfast blend) and the first brew is already one of the loveliest coffees I've ever had, and I have tried a LOT of coffees.

Not getting paid to link any of that, lol, just sharing.

Good thing I couldn't sleep last night, got a late call, burrito's daycare is closed tomorrow because fever spike and sickie stuff, so today is a burrito day at my house, yay! I'm really good at early mornings, so I popped up when Scott got up for work at 4 and had a pie out by 5:30. YUM! Scott loves pecan pie and it's a rare thing around here because of my across the board nut allergy. I'm actually only confirmed on peanut and cashews (both real bad), but since most nuts are processed in a facility that also processes those other two, I am automatically exposed to severe allergens just being around any nuts in any form, including makeups and lotions. Thankfully, I can snip the pecans open and stir them in without having to touch them (but I still wash my hands after handling the package to be on the safe side), and voila, today we have pie.

Need to leave the house in a few minutes to get burrito. I'm ready!

rounding up the Sunday brain cell posse

Yesterday was a very burrito day. Her first beeline was straight to grampa.

After a big breakfast of pancake and banana and egg she helped her mama sort her old clothes and put them in the ebay store. I can already see a natural knack for retail because she just loves being busy.

The road trip to see Great-Granny next door was fun! Grampa found her mama's old wagon in the basement, yay!

Of course, on a day like yesterday you have to go buy punkins, and she came home with an apple as big as her tummy.

Things got a little crazy after that. I am now the proud owner of Pumpkin Art.

I wasn't surprised when burrito and grampa both conked out for a couple of hours, they got pretty worn out. Not sure if she'll be back today for football, but after the brainwashing we've done in the past switching her out to a Moss jersey, that's probably our fault.

Oops, this turned into Burrito blog. Better turn it back into Pinky blog. 

Pinky is halfway through prednisone taper. I'm usually pretty crabby with it by now, but either I'm handling it better or I just needed it that badly. Yesterday I got the blood pressure drop that sometimes comes with it, so I had to skip my blood pressure pill and monitor. My fasting glucose has been wonderful, but rises with a vengeance through the day because prednisone forces the liver to dump all the backup emergency stores every time you take a dose, so all it takes is 5 carbs to keep me around 180 all day, which is pretty ridiculous. I made the mistake of cutting a small carrot into my caramelized brussels sprouts and onions yesterday, won't be doing that again. Since I don't control with meds, I can tell exactly where the high blood sugar headaches come from, and they suck. And since I'm severely restricted to only one pain pill a day, I can't go around popping pills for mistakes like that. By the way, yes, carrots = donut to an untreated diabetic. Not all veggies are 'healthy' all the time.

On the other hand, I've had remarkable clarity since this all started. The brain fog I've lived with for YEARS has been nearly nonexistent this week. No idea if that's thanks to the prednisone or thanks to getting off wheat. I'm discovering that wheat intolerance is sometimes associated with brain fog and even mental illness, yowza. I don't think that's my original cause, because onset in 2004 came with a viral infection that hit my neurosystem, but it seems to be becoming part of my ongoing healing now. The intolerances I've developed since another severe viral infection in 2007 directly impact all my systems, including my brain function, so I'm really not surprised to be running into other people noticing stuff like this, too.

At any rate, I'm getting a very pleasantly surprising amount of work done lately, huzzah! I'm playing musical chairs with deadlines, have some decisions to make by Halloween about directions for the rest of the year. The blog moves HAVE to be done by then, the continuing investment must be sorted out, and *then* it's back to getting the first book off the ground. I can't take this annual Xanga shredding.

Advice to writers- if you are literally writing blogs in order to publish, omg back them up continually on a disk or something. I'm very seriously not joking about having written probably 2 million words in the last few years. All of it is raw and unedited, and none of it was backed up on anything else but a blog host that suddenly nearly went *poof*. The only thing that stopped it all from disappearing was the opportunity for heavy investment. Lesson learned. I will never again assume any other blog host won't nosedive any second, not even wordpress.

Today needs a plan. Looks like lunch will be bbq pork steaks, baked beans, and cheesy broccoli. The apple pie is nearly wiped out, so maybe I'll make autumn cupcakes for Scott to take to work tomorrow. Need to keep an eye on my team this week, had reached the point of 21% underdogs before I started fixing on Thursday, egads. I am currently 8th in the standings and as of this moment my week 3 matchup still looks pretty dismal.

It's nearly 5:30 a.m. now, the day's a-wastin'! This post got pretty long.

conquering resolutions

Scott said I was kinda rude in the furniture store, but I was so focused on sifting down styles, sizes, and prices that I guess I didn't notice salesmen were flying out of the way like bowling pins. I don't have time to say "I'm fine" 5 times to 5 different people who suddenly loom up in my face like video game disruptions, and then duke it out over who is gaming whom. Besides, it was a huge store, and the dressers were miles apart. I had to keep circling while I still had fresh images and figures in my glitchy brain. Anyway, that's another resolution down. You can click this pic to see it on the website if you want details.

So now I've got about 10 days to get on top of where that will need to go in my bedroom. Time to fly through everything that has piled up in my life on the side over the last couple of years while we've been distracted with burrito stuffs. 

Lexx and Xanga and Nixa all have Xs in them

So, is moving my stuff to mobile viewing worth it? Let's see how things are going.

1- 199 hits on my new mobile Pinky in just 8 days.
2- 463 hits on my new mobile Lexx blog in the first month.

Stuff that has always been mobile-

3- my spoonie blog has 3200+ hits, which I never expected
4- my dotcom has been seen by 30 countries and I'm not even published yet.
5- nearly 1800 views on my Arch Heretic blog on wordpress

Soon I'll start moving the surveys onto a new mobile blog. Bluejacky gets hit harder than any other blog I've ever made. It's going to be a LOT of work.

Why am I doing this? The Xanga groups on facebook are getting edgy again. No one has heard anything, no one knows what happens next... I can't just sit back and believe this time. I hafta get backups going before the possibility swoops in that all my hard work will suddenly either be gone or at the very least untouchable even by me.

I think the Xanga team ran into a legal wall or something. I've been watching Xanga for a decade now, they've made it through so much stuff behind the scenes, I can't just ditch them with the thought that they don't care and will dump us in the cold. However, if a court order ever comes through for them to freeze assets or the WordPress team stymies their attempts at integration, there isn't much any of us can do. I'm not leaving Xanga, but I am totally preparing this time for possible rips in the spacetime continuum.

In the meantime, it's Labor Day weekend! With lots and lots of rain! We're actually quite thrilled at all this rain, my chickens were dehydrating. Don't want them getting mixed up with the leaf piles that will start happening in a few weeks. I decided while I'm zipping and dodging all over the webs like a banshee getting my stuff moved, I may as well get busy on the chicken blog again. I haven't really pushed that one, only has 66 hits on it, but in the olden days the chicken blog I had got kinda popular. We'll see what happens.

I need to get breakfast going before burrito shows back up. We had fun yesterday, found out the kid has skillz... Only 13 months old and can already handle a phone screen trying to pull up videos to watch.

But don't worry, she's genetically super hyper like her mom and Grampa Scott, so actually catching her sitting still for a few seconds was a miracle. She'll definitely need a brain chip for her active lifestyle.