End of Summer

Went to the last home game of the season. TTFN Redbirds.  

End of the Month/Madness

Well, bless you for still checking in here. I don't deserve readers since I have been treating this blog so poorly. I have good reasons though.  Travel, humid weather, ebay auctions, movie stuff, and I took on a condensed summer course and I've been cramming in fifteen weeks worth of planning, lecturing, adjusting to new students, and grading all in a single teeny, short month.

I almost wrote "I have been really busy" but then I was reminded of some recent conversations I've had with 1) people that told me how BUSY they are and 2) with people who were annoyed with people talking about how BUSY they are.

Here's a free tidbit from my manners manual: In general, when you tell another person that you are just so BUSY, it will probably be taken as a bit of an insult and/or you will look like a self-important ass. It insinuates that the listener is a person who has nothing to do but sit around and listen to how busy other people are.

Imagine a blogger (are people still called bloggers? What do I know, I still have a blogger account) complaining about how busy they are to some readers that have taken the time to drop by and see what they've been up to. It just isn't good etiquette and a google search tells me that many others have observed this annoyance. However it continues - people still miraculously find time to complain. I manage to carve out lots of time for complaining, but never about being busy. I complain mostly about United Airlines and how Subway sandwich artists should be forced to eat a giant three-tablespoon scoop of yellow mustard during sandwich training because that is the only way they will ever understand what "just a little mustard" means.

So you can see just how gracious I am that I spared you from the busy BS. Let's just assume we are all out there, making it happen or watching it happen or just whatever. I have to get back to sorting through my mega-gigs of photos from summer thus far. Lots of pics to share and we are on the road again tomorrow.  Expect major gas station snack pics on my instagram.

Delay Day

So sorry. Forgot to mention I was on the northen road again. Back soon.

The Best Intentions

Whenever I start to type I intend to write one of those beautiful essays that are about a mothers breath, wanting a stranger to touch our elbow, the effect of a sunny day on an old heroin habit, the pain of the pain of the pain, the lightness of our hearts after we have that one experience that makes us realize we were standing right in the place we were looking for the whole time.... but nothing comes out of me.... My words are always so clunky and even though I try, there just aren’t sweet ways to write about being cranky.  

It doesn’t help that I woke up this morning with my sinus bones snot-glued to my brain bones, a rejection email waiting in my inbox, and a fat tax bill from the great State of CA (thanks 2007) in the daily mail. I only check my mail because I am hoping Sargent Sparkle will post something my way. I made the mistake of watching The Invisible War the other day so, every day that I don’t hear from her I am certain that she has fallen into an Army rape den in the middle of Afghanistan. 

And then I looked around... maybe what I had been looking for was right in front of me the whole time!

95 More Posts Until The End

My attention to this blog has been better lately, but lets be real, it has been sporadic in recent years. And now that I can't use the great and powerful Windows LiveWriter, I don't like posting pictures here as much as I used to. I tired to use what everyone tells me is the Mac equivalent: "MarsEdit" and another one - both were total crap as far as image editing and placement. But that isn't the only problem with hanging onto blogger, the problem is that my juicy stories need to be put on the secret blog (limited public viewing) or sold for cash or cigarettes and nowadays it is just easier to tell stories on tumblr, instagram, and vine and..hmm..maybe twitter. Although, my problem with twitter is that it is only as good as the moments I'm checking it. Too many tweets! You better hope your witty tweet showed up in the block of time I was glancing at my account or I will never know how hilarious you are.

Here is proof of my blogging decline:

2009 was obviously a big year.  I think moving to the south was very inspirational.  Let's not even talk about 2005!  What a statement! ONE post.

To further crunch the numbers and give you an idea of how much one has to "blog" to keep up respectable content:

3 posts a week = 156 posts a year
2 posts a week = 104 posts a year

And for fun, here are my comment stats:

Wondering about the comments awaiting moderation? Some cool spam from hotels in India and religious sites that I haven't brought myself to delete because I may need them for a story prompt or I may need to give my comment numbers a vanity-boost someday.

And finally the total number of posts on this eight-year-old endeavor (if you want to count 2005, nine years):

905 posts! 95 more I will have reached 1000 posts and then I can retire, well, retire this blog anyway. I would hate to set it on the shelf without a nice round number so I'm going for 1000. 

I found this handy days-from-now calculator and determined that if I were to start blogging once a day every day from here on out. This blog would retire on July 2nd, 2013 and August 9th if I wanted to take the weekends off. 

If I actually post 95 more times this year I will reach 111 posts for 2013 and that is back to 2011 levels! What if I get so inspired that I don't want to get rid of this beaute? We'll just have to see what happens. 

The spooky future: A PC in a Mac!

Thanks to the magic of computing I found a way to run the incomparable Windows Live Writer on my new Mac. Isn’t that thrilling? I may be able to keep this thing up for just a little while longer.

So I’m way behind on any kind of update. Know this: It snowed here in Memphis the day after Christmas and it was very exciting.

It is now 2013 and, you know, the number thirteen is lucky and unlucky so you need to ask yourself, “what will it be for me?” I can tell you I lived in an old, old building in the cass corridor and tons of unlucky stuff happened in that apartment: plagues of both cockroaches and mice, theft, burnt cookies, violent break-ins, voo-doo – you name it. I moved out after six months. I realized later that technically that apartment would have been apartment 13, but the owners chose to skip that number when it came to “naming” apartments, so every floor had three apartments and on my floor there were apartments 11,12, and 14. Isn’t that just something? I don’t believe in curses or bad luck, but sometimes they believe in me.

Now, enjoy this spooky picture of lights on a snowy house: 

And appreciate the awesomeness of a Memphis NYE:

Happy New Year to all.

Strange Sightings

It's been a weird couple weeks. For example, I saw these guys dressed up like lime heros driving down Walnut Grove waving at people and falpping their lime capes around and I spotted a vanity plate that said YU1DRNG.  Did the owner of that plate know I would be wondering about chubby dudes dressed up like green fruity super heros?

I'll be back on the road soon. My tumblr will be the place to check for updates.  More content here soon.