My Monday started with flipping a broken purple pen into my first cup of beautiful coffee. How's yours? Wish I'd taken a pic and used it as today's demotivational poster, but here's an even better one from someone else. Click it for more fun.
I haven't had a medrol pack in so many years. I remember being miserable on them, and now I know why- my extended blood pressure spike is incredible. If I lived like that all the time I'd be dx'd stage 2 hypertension, which is considered extremely serious, so I may forego the rest of the medrol pack. The goal was to reduce possible fibro flare induced tissue swelling around craniocervical area, which was also spiking my blood pressure, and something's working because that pressure is gone, so hopefully this all settles back down fairly quickly now. All I can do is just keep an eye on it for a few days.
I spent Derby Day on Mo Creatures. Is it any surprise? But I did stop and watch the pre-parade and the big race. I know some people might think it silly to make a big deal out of little things like a fairy horse on a minecraft server, but a years long loose string came together beautifully in my heart and head over it, and only a tiny handful of people have a clue why, because I never talk about it.
A difficult era has begun in family around me, setting the background behind Pinky blog for a few weeks or months. I like to stay focused on my own stuff here, but want to recognize loved ones coming together in support and many big feelings. I know this is probably a weird way to pay homage, but the story behind Purple Rain is important, the spirit of sport is a big part of us, and yes, half the state just flooded, so I'm deeply appreciating this video this morning. (I'm loling that it's a Saints field in a Vikes family, but I do have a Saints fan in the house lately...) The love is strong in this family in spite of some very long hard roads.
I took vengeance on my paper.li yesterday after the latest edition came out and restructured the content gathering. I really do loathe the new algorithm. Even with stricter, tighter controls (which I pay for), I can't seem to stop one or two people from hogging the entire paper every little bit, based only on the very simple fact that their particular tweets or shared tweets get the majority of faves and RTs that day on twitter, and the algorithm notices and prioritizes by popularity, which means there is no truly random tweet sampling, it's all skewed to who is tweeting or retweeting the most popular tweets, which is NOT what I want because it knocks out nearly everyone else on the same or alternating list who have actual awesome content. I'm not thrilled about how the leading stories are picked up, either, might hafta dig a little deeper and see if I can cinch up how the story leads land in the upper section. Also toying with doing a guest list once a week just to splash a big load of different stuff in one day. The dangers of that are, say, getting a cool scientist on a rant day (srsly? plz to stop being uncooooooool), or getting a filmmaker on a drunk day (facepalms g.a.l.o.r.e.), you get the picture. Anyway, I've got so many lists, several of them are business-y, might be fun to see what happens. Or not. But perhaps I can theme within a theme if I can rig the controls.
As I was thinking all this (in the shower, like corporate execs do, naked), I also thought how easy it would be to start another paper.li (for free) purposely grabbing my fave celebs on twitter, just make it all about the twitter buzz from the cream that's already risen to the top. It wouldn't always look cool like this, of course, but it might be fun. This one clicks back to the smooshed together survey.
We all know Groovy Bruce has a Shat crush. He likes it sticky, apparently. Anyway, not sure how soon I'll get on that.
Halloween pulled some cosmic trickery on my family. Most people start their Halloweens later in the day or near sunset, well, ours started bright and early before the crack of dawn after Twink texted us a pic of her very swollen face and off we all went to the ER. Her lips were pretty spectacular, stuff you see in lip injections gone awry on places like Buzzfeed, and her whole body was doing this lumpy neon pink leprosy thing. Couldn't have picked a more perfect day for it, right? I mean, Halloween. While mama got shots and more shots, a very busy Bunny and I took up hallway monitor patrol and probably put a couple miles on our matching neon pink Nikes, and we were so awesome in our fall fashion long sleeve autumn tees that all the old people smiled real big at us. And it was a good thing Grampa was there, too, fixing the kid stuff.
After the scary part was over, we all went home and collapsed back into bed and woke up to Sploit sending flooding pix from Houston, people knee deep out in a residential street kind of stuff, and then on twitter I saw all kinds of tweets about Halloween plans going soggy over several areas for lots of people. So, Happy Halloween, right?
We had rain all day here, too, and not one single trick-or-treater for the first time EVER, but that didn't stop me from donning my costume. Big thank you to Walmart for making it so easy this year with their 'Awesome Gramma Costume' loungewear selection, lol. I don't do fleece very well, though, no way I could actually sleep in that outfit without having to turn on the AC in 40 degree weather, so I guess I won't be wearing Pinkyween all winter like I thought. It's still cute, though.
A couple of Bunny and Batman pix rolled in, they were really cute. The 'cranky ninja' pose cracks me up.
We've been having another spectacular ladybug year. I call this one "Bob on gray frosting." We won't talk about "Bob bits in hair" or "Bob drives a CRV" or "Bob caught in human nostril". Bob is a really busy guy in a multiplex of universal being, which means he's really good at quantum flux. If you ever think Bob was a goner, you thought wrong. He manifests in the millions, kind of like the Master in Master Race on Doctor Who.
November in my house is pretty much about recovering from one holiday while we wildly slide toward the next one, with all kinds of stuff happening in between. There are birthdays and another baby coming to one of the nieces, and this is also the month @bonenado and I visit the cemetery and remember our lost babies, not between us, but from before we became our own thing. And everything gets crunched under football and deer season, and by the time Thanksgiving gets here, we really are a big chaotic mess. I keep a firm grip on visualizing hot chocolate and Macy's parade and turkey in the oven smells until it actually gets here while my reality usually turns into bumbling around forgetting things and getting lost in stores. Things have been changing so much this year, I'm looking forward to the what ifs of November 2015 maybe being a nicer experience than usual. It's really nice having my brain mostly back.
It was inspired by the visual art in a vid I shared last week, which reminds me of a sophisticated math render used with a several different techniques, and of course I love the pinks and blues and the way the visuals flow. I've been a Vanessa fan for years, regularly make it back around to her stuff on youtube. I don't think most Americans are very aware of her unless they are hardcore Johnny Depp fans, and even then, everyone's cool if you take Vanessa's side and still love Johnny.
I've lived around here since 1976 and never once saw it this bad. This is the top of the James River going through Ozark. Won't be any Chinese take out for awhile. I'm loading these full size on photobucket, so you can click each one for more detail if you want. I didn't take these pix, got them from locals off facebook.
There was another year it flooded pretty good, sometime in the 80s I think, and businesses took hits like this, but I'd never seen the water that high coming over the bridge.
Likewise, Scott said the Finley was crested right at the bottom of the bridge when he drove over yesterday. Haven't been watching the news so I imagine there were other reports again about lower down the James River and up at I-44. I think this is the first time we've seen not just this much flooding, but actual major road closures twice in one year.
I think all the pipeline people should forget about the stupid fracking and get this water over to California. THAT would be a pipeline everyone could get behind, am I right? We've had enough water just in my area over the last 6 weeks to make deserts bloom elsewhere. I'm amazed no one has even thought of this contingency. We've got power lines that shunt power to other cities/states, pipelines that shunt oil across the continent, but no one moves the water. Wasn't the Roman empire built on an aqueduct system? Easy irrigation right there. Build it and things will grow. Stop pumping out the water table for farming.
In the meantime, ants have established a ranking system evaluating my kitchen for a possible massive pupae move. I've seen this happen before. One year I decided to move a few deck plants to bigger pots and threw an entire civilization into a nasty tizzy, with thousands of workers yelling SAVE THE BABIES! and carrying eggs away. I'd really rather that didn't happen in my kitchen. We don't use insecticides because my allergies are so severe, so we've been staying on top of incoming along a particular baseboard with vinegar spray and a vacuum hose. I've caught them reporting back to base camp with little walkie talkies from a cupboard full of dishes and said oh HELL no, and one of them took his little goggles off and shook his fist at me. I have a feeling the sun coming out isn't going to cancel any plans. Crossing my fingers the ground dries out a little bit before it rains again, maybe they'll get distracted with easy living out there again. Sure ain't no ant food in here.
I have to be honest, it's not as bad as the year ants moved in under the fridge and built a nuclear reactor, or the year the frog got in and bounced off the walls like a poltergeist all night, or the year a 6 foot black snake draped itself over our front door frame and I had to stop Scott running out shooting holes in the house, or the year I nearly stepped barefoot in my kitchen on the biggest nastiest black spider from hell you ever saw that was actually as long as my foot (I've worn sox ever since), or the year the squirrel died in the walls and the house stunk for two weeks, or the year chipmunks carried off over a gallon of chicken feed that we found buried in a big stash in the garden, or the year of one boil order after another until finally the community well owner sold and let city water take over, or the year...
Ok, I won't go over all 23 years. August will be 23 years on this house. Out in the wet wild woods. I quietly chuckle when people talk about going green and back to nature. They always bring their bug spray and their dogs and their lawnmowers. They go hang out at the pool up the street. They call pest control and professional cleaners and giant construction rigs to install experimental ungodly expensive eco systems in their homes. They sit on matching lawn furniture sipping beverages and talking on phones. They complain when it's time to pave the street again because the sticky tar flecks up the paint jobs on their new cars.
I'm actually in Bunny brain fry. In between super ADHD spells we've been doing office work.
I may hafta put some headphones on. Counting down to #napclub. She's being great, I'm guess I'm just in some kind of 'day off' shock. I've slung a lot of stuff out last few days.
I once told @bonenado I was feeling pithy. He misunderstood.
This is my phone cord.
This is the state of my state.
This is me reflecting on some news I got today, and how owning one's day of death can completely change a person's path, attitude, strength, and wisdom. "Survival is the key." I say this not for the one who passed, but for me, as one who survived the surrealism, and can now feel compassion for those still caught in it.
Imagining all the cave crickets and spiders lurking in the gravel drainage wall around the foundation suddenly scrabbling for dry spots inside outer wall hangovers...
We live on a hill, so we rarely see incoming. Of course, that depends on what kind of shape the wraparound venting is in. House next door flooded because guttering was plugged up. Our basement has a pretty crack letting seepage in. We haven't seen a summer this wet in so many years that we're actually hoping everything dries up real soon. Usually starting to get crunchy grass by now, and I worry obsessively about the woods burning down because of all the idiots setting off fireworks for two weeks straight. Instead, this year we live in a steamy jungle with more spiders and snakes than ever.
One of the prettiest grasshoppers I've ever seen, on a solar panel on my deck.
And it would coincide with the first time I don't have chickens in ten years. Aside from already being overrun with critters that make our whole yard seem like a moving carpet, we're almost up to one of the biggest cicada years of the century. We've got so many little toads that whole tribes of crows hang around the front yard, like gothic robins looking for something bigger than worms. They stand around like statues until they see a slight movement, then bam, just like a robin moves. Since @bonenado carefully mows with the blades high to save toad lives, he's kind of crabby about the crows and shoos them away when he sees them.
The humidity is so bad that our AC won't go off, chugging away just so we can breathe. Cars are more sluggish in humidity. People who never venture beyond the 'deep south' don't realize how efficiently an engine can run once real air can circulate through the manifold, and how more instantly responsive that makes things like pushing down on a gas pedal. Laboring up and down the rugged Ozark highways in a summer like this is sticky business. Literally. Everything in and out of my car feels sticky.
I'm not whining, actually thrilled I've been able to stay home in the house so much this summer. Might change that tune once the cicadas are out, because the noise will be nearly unbearable. On any normal cicada year we have to turn the TV way up and can't hear on our phones, and even headphones on a playlist can't keep the continual racket out. This year is going to be spectacular. The only people who won't hear them will already be completely deaf. I can't imagine being dependent on hearing devices during a really big cicada year, it would just about be impossible.
Ok, gotta get my head on track. I've already started a part two Giggy post, wanna get that out before we wind up with a Bunny day. Not sure if I should do any laundry. You guys who don't own your own septic and never have to worry about super ground saturation, one less thing off your mind, right? Right. I'm gonna go dance it off getting some other chores done in between paragraphs and linking graphics. To the fan who looped this one- U ROCK. Thankyou.
Paper.li has invited me to play with a free month of Pro, since the new settings they're working on aren't available to free users, which I'll probablydo because I've been considering going Pro anyway. It's a cheap enough toy, who knows, I might really like it once I've upgraded.
In the meantime, we're at a stalemate. I've changed my distribution outlets, removed the widget off my blog, and I'm going to have to really get in there and crank down on the settings, which are frustratingly limited for free users, but if I pay $100+ a year JUST to use *a* new setting they're toying with after jacking the algorithm to the point of me turning my paper off (I'm sorry, I don't wanna be known for leading sex shocker stories), then they'd better have some rockin' awesome other stuff I can do, as well.
It's one thing to be silly on my own blog or feed about stuff, it's another to jerk the general public around with distasteful shock jock material when my original intent is to entertain with fun, interesting, and positivity.
And I need new glasses. >=l I need to stay focused on my actual needs in real life right now.
This is a thing today. @bonenado is trying to make it home before they close the road. I've lived in this area since 1976, and I've never seen Springfield this close to being completely cut off from everything south of it. Seriously.
Mostly my day is just silly stuff while I get some work done. Who knows, maybe I really will pick up a little Russian. And I do seriously want to know about the voice overs.
Last night's dream was stupid, awful, ridiculous, and unbelievably disgusting, and yet I wake up in this fantastic mood.
Ok, that was interesting. OUT magazine just popped open a full page and said hello, like we're pals or something. I think bots are watching me type out my blog. I'm not surprised, but maybe I should be more specific so a bot will jump into my screen with something a little more awesome. Speaking of awesome, THIS happened yesterday. It's 30 minutes long but safe for work, happy Friday.
Ok, where was I? I've been meaning to mention the 50+ cave crickets @bonenado has trapped on tape in the basement just in the last month. Just about the time I nearly recanted the giant-spider-lurking-in-the-basement ban, I ran face to face (seriously, eye level) into the granpappy of all brown recluses sitting on the washcloth pile in the linen closet like he was set up for a meeting and I was late. Of course, Scott sprang into action racing up the stairs to get the vacuum hose leaving me to hold a silver dollar sized highly poisonous spider locked in place with a stare down. Anyhoo, I have a very conditional recant now- one giant wolf spider is allowed to lurk in the basement IF we never see it and IF it never comes upstairs and ONLY IF it keeps the rest of the bug and spider population near to zero. Wouldn't it be cool if we could domestically train a giant house spider like that instead of using pesticides? I'm feeling a bit light headed just typing out the words 'giant spider' over and over, so quick, let us change the subject.
~~~searching internet~~~
Apparently no one has ever put Benedict into a glitter graphic. You guys are letting me down in the need-distraction-NOW department. Wo, hold. the. phone. I have found Ben blingee swag. Get a little trash glam going here, if this eye splat won't take my mind off a spider, nothing will.
Anyone else notice my depression plunge was timed with the Houston flooding? We've all touched base now, my people are good, I'm bouncing around the house again. Makes you wonder how families handled getting once a year letters from pioneers. Of course, they didn't have a weather channel hammering them with helicopter views of everything inside a beltway under water. This isn't my first long distance holding-my-breath experience watching my baby live through top 5 disasters. Her wedding on the beach was literally destroyed by one of the biggest hurricanes ever to hit land there. Then the first text after 2 days of silence is always about a wasp or something, so imagine me insanely giggling like a left behind mama finally getting a letter from a pioneer kid after rumors of apocalyptic death and disaster. My dark urges to kill and maim have melted away and the world looks sweet again.
p.s. The mistake was PINK in case you haven't seen the show
No, I'm not telling you last night's dream. But it was very weird. It was like the world was becoming synchronized and everyone was being channeled into their favorite drugs and religions and then grouped up for strange mental exercises that broke down their safety barriers (killed the red flags and warning whistles going off in their heads) until everyone was happily wasted and cooperating like drones doing things they'd have resisted doing otherwise. In my dream I had figured it out and managed to evade most of the mind numbing by weaving my way through the groups, but eventually it all caught up with me, someone managed to get me drugged, and I eventually caved to being initiated into a group. I wasn't at all pleased, but what could I do? The only way out was rebelling and being relocated by the overseers, which I already knew meant disappearing and being killed. The groups weren't told that, they thought the people who left just went to other groups. But once initiated, I discovered I could come and go more freely in different ways without suspicion, so I played along and kept weaving in and out of the other groups watching what was really going on.
I talked to my dad the other day. It's all real. Kinda making me wonder if the genetic aspie thing on my dad's side was part of an engineering tool, because some really brilliant people come out of Amish & Mennonite communities. Funny that a little boy growing up in the middle of a wheat field could know so much about all the stuff that's coming out 70 years later all over the internet.
Wet. Yesterday was a series of emergency flash flood alerts coming over the phone, my umbrella giving out, the Weather Channel contacting me for permission to use photos, my dry cleaning getting damp even inside the bag, a card I mailed getting smudged up even though I protected it... I've been through some pretty good rains but yesterday was an hours long neverending fight for dominance. Even with an umbrella, an entry carpet, and being careful where I set the sacks down, my kitchen and I were both so wet after I got the groceries in that I had to change every stitch on me and then clean up the floors. WET. But I was glad to see it. August going into September had gotten so dry that I was afraid we'd wind up with a quickie autumn and the leaves would suddenly turn brown and shrivel off overnight. I've seen that happen in years past, it's depressing. Our longest lasting most colorful autumns seem to happen after torrential rains soak into the trees just before the leaves start turning colors.
Quick disclaimer- please don't take pictures while you are driving, especially in bad weather. It's very dangerous and not worth your life and limb or a smashed up car. I have been photographing weather and scenery in the Ozarks for years, and I'm usually stopped or going very slowly for some reason. Please don't 'copy' me and zoom around taking pictures while you drive.
This is one of the southernmost lights in Nixa, the only one still working in the entire town by the time I arrived.
And just as I got there, the lights stopped working and the rain got so heavy we had to pull over and sit there. My camera could see better than I could.
I wound up routing through flooded parking lots through part of town, this is the northernmost end before the official crossover into Springfield on the other side of the James River. This pic clicks to a cute convo on twitter.
This one from National just north of Battlefield in Springfield by the park clicks to the tweet that prompted Weather Channel to contact me. No idea what became of that, I'm sure it got 'drowned out' in all the Hurricane Odile coverage.
This next one clicks to a tweet that might have started rumors... O_o haha. My daughter called up during her lunch break and told me the local weather was saying flooding around Campbell and was worried about driving, well, I had tweeted this a little earlier with specific coordinates.
Nice little break from the rain in Mama Jean's, my fave organic shopping in Springfield. Click this pic to go to my facebook checkin if you'd like to see more. This is gratuitous, not paid to link.
Finally headed home.
Autumn in the Ozarks is a real treat. I've done other posts in the past. These are from a blog that no longer has mobile viewing after a rough migration to new servers, so I'm moving them to my chicken blog. They come up on mobile and devices now.
