Category: Spiffy Stuff

Happy birthday Kidlet!

Except I guess you’re not such a kidlet anymore. Seventeen. The big 1-7. You are now allowed into R-rated movies without adult supervision. Congratulations! 🙂

Man. I can’t believe I have a 17 year-old daughter. Seems like yesterday that you were parading around in pigtails and your Disney princess jammies. I remember your first steps when you awkwardly toddled from one side of your playpen to the other. I love the funny way tiny kids walk, and yours was no exception. It was freaking adorable.

I remember how you were a very good little sleeper. No fussy nights for you. But you would refuse to take naps when all the other kids at daycare did. So you were up all day, and in bed by 7:30pm. Which is probably why you slept all night. Thanks for that 🙂

I remember when you FINALLY learned to ride a bike. Or when you and Grammy would be snuggled up watching telly. I learned to love Rugrats because you loved it so much. I just couldn’t do the Barney thing though, sorry. I remember you having a blast when you figured out how to stand on your head. Couldn’t keep you off it 🙂 Then you started school and loved it so much. New friends (some you still have!) and so many things to learn. I loved seeing you become a voracious reader – moreso than I ever was, and I’m pretty voracious.

We’ve had some rough times and some fun times. Lots of changes. Lots of sad stuff.  But lots of the good too. And for me, there is nothing more fun than hanging out with you and just being silly. I’m glad we still do that. I’m glad you still give me hugs and that I can tell you “I Love You” every single day.

You’re a phenomenal person kiddo. I love you very much, and I hope you had a happy birthday.

Love,
Mom

Read More

JK Rowling is my hero

JK just gave a commencement speech at Harvard and she spoke on the benefits of failure. The whole speech is fantastic but the failure stuff hit home:

The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure….I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. ,…Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way….Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned….

[Link to the full speech]

Read More

Lazy Sunday

Do ant bait traps work? I’ve discovered that ants have been getting into my kitchen via a very small tear in the weather-stripping on the back door. I hate ants. Sure, they’re harmless. But they’re all buggy and twitchy and make me feel itchy and seeing one crawl across the kitchen counter makes me jump about ten feet. I bought some ant bait thingies, but I’m skeptical on whether they’ll actually work. We’ll see I guess. I fixed the weather-stripping hole so maybe they won’t be able to get in now and the traps will kill the ones who did make it. We rarely use the backdoor, so I never even realized the hole was there.

The weather’s been nice – a break from the storms – and I went for a walk yesterday with the cam. Didn’t take any stunning pics or anything, but just knowing that I *could* take a stunning pic while on a walk makes me happy 🙂 Shan’s had the car this weekend while she worked, so I’ve been stuck at home. I did not make any progress on CherryPop, but I’m okay with that for now. I’m not feeling the guilt just now. Some ideas are percolating in the noggin and I’m pretty sure at some point I’ll just have an uncontrollable, overwhelming urge to spew out volumes on the story. I’m looking forward to that.

I do have a new project for the summer that I’m very excited about. I hope it’s okay to mention it – not sure if it’s a big secret or anything. The Buffy Between the Lines folks, as I’ve mentioned before, have grand plans to produce Angel Between the Lines as well as Firefly Between the Lines. Apparently, planning has been underway on Angel for a fair bit now, but unfortunately (but fortunately for me) one of the writers had to drop out. So I jumped at the chance to write for ABtL when the email went out asking if anyone was interested. I will get to co-write the first episode 🙂

First drafts are due on September 1st, so I actually have a deadline to work towards. The Fabz Tabz (“The Joss” of this whole Between the Lines phenomenon) gave my writing partner and me a great outline to work with and I think this will be a very good learning experience. Seeing the outline and spending the past few days making notes and working within the confines of the storyline someone else made up is going to be a lot of fun. My writing partner had great notes herself and I think she’s going to be a lot of fun to work with. I just can’t express enough how exciting this is to me 🙂

And it just may stimulate the whole CherryPop storyline too, or at least give me new ways to work on it.

I think I had more to write about but I’m trying to fight on oncoming migraine so I’m not very focusy. Might go for another walk and see if the fresh air helps.

Read More

Storminess and Geek Chic

Took some video of the oncoming storm tonight. Nothing dangerous and I was safe inside when it hit, although again, my town fared well when all was said and done (though this seems to be the storm that never ends. It hit here around 6-ish, and it’s after 9pm and now we’re getting hail.)

Anyway, here’s the vid. There’s nothing sexy in it – no funnel clouds or whipping wind. Just some incredible looking cloud formations that I liked.

Neat eh? There are also some pix of it over on Snaps.

In other news, I’m doing something kind of fun with the Snaps site. I’m calling it Geek Chic and it’s sort of like what Dooce does with her awesome ‘Daily Style’ section of her site. It’s a separate section of Snaps and these photos won’t show up in the main blog area. I’m going to try posting daily(ish) pics of some of the geeky, chic-y stuff I own. While I’m sure that doesn’t sound very exciting, it’s actually fascinating. I never “got” much into Dooce’s style pix, but the more I looked at those pix, the more I got hooked. It’s kind of a glimpse into someone’s house when they left the curtains open at night. Which I totally love doing. My theory is, if you’re going to leave them open and lights a-blazing, I’m gonna peek as I drive by.

Anyway, you can get to know a person’s tastes and interests through images, plus it gives me another excuse to practice with the cam 🙂 So check it out.

I’m off to get the kidlet who spent most of her shift huddled up in the bathroom with her coworkers during the storm. I don’t like it that she was at work during the blowing of the sirens. My instinct on the way home from Walmart was to stop and get her. But I wasn’t sure if I should or if she’d get in trouble or what. We’ll discuss what to do from now on when she gets home though.

Read More

It’s here!

I haz a new camera! Now I can stop agonizing over the lack of package tracking updates – it came a day early. So. Much. Woot!

It’s smaller than I thought, but it fits nicely in my hand, and so far it takes bloody great pictures 🙂 I’m pretty much just clicking anything with it right now, checking it out, you know. I’m going to install a gallery though because I plan to get fancy 🙂

I tried snapping Spooky but she kept wandering out of the shot and appearing completely disinterested.

Anyway… yay! I’m so excited!

Read More

Snapshots

I read this story on Mental Floss about a man who took a Polaroid snapshot every day from 1979 to 1997. And I was in awe. It really is a wonderful way to tell the story of someone’s life. I tried doing it for a year (from 2005 to 2006, but I fell short by a few months) and found it difficult to find interesting things to take pictures of every day, considering that my daily life is pretty much routine. I thought it would be boring to look at yet another picture of my cat, or some video I bought.

But maybe I was wrong-headed about it. Looking at it from a different perspective, say, after I’m dead, even the boring pictures might have some kind of meaning for my family and friends. Something my daughter could have. Well I don’t want to go all morbid here, but maybe it would be worth reviving the pic-a-day thing. Yeah. I’m sitting here pondering this and the more I ponder, the better the idea sounds. Which is what I thought the first time I did this project, but I’m going to quit caring whether people think the pics are dull.

Plus, thanks to a fabulous birthday pressie gift card (Thanks dad!) I was able to get a very nice new digital camera that I have been wanting for a very long time now. So I think it’s fate that I found that article the morning after I bought my new camera.

So expect a new section of ukmelia soon for the photos. And if some of them are boring, well, that’s life 🙂

Read More

Thanks a lot Mike

I’ve been haunted by this song for two days now.

I played it for Shannon who promptly bought it on iTunes and currently, I am downloading the damn game so I can play it. I can never resist a smartass computer.

And I can’t get the song out of my head. I woke up yesterday and today with it in there. It’s like a deliciously moist (sorry Tonya) cake.

Read More