VaCaDay 5

It was a very random day.

I woke up to an absolutely dreadful smell coming from the kitchen. It took some hunting to detect that its source was the refrigerator -- after I'd emptied the compost bucket and cleaned it with boiling water -- and then I scrubbed out the inside of the fridge. No luck. Turns out it was some garlic-heavy food that the Hubs had made last night for tonight's dinner. It was just a bit overpowering.

What took up most of my day was copying over old diary entries, now that I have a rhythm going. I did fifty, maybe, maybe more. The interesting part of doing this is reading the old entries. Although I only have a few more to go and then 2007 is finished, I decided to work on 2002, and I only have a few of those left, too. These were my first diary entries, since I started in October, 2002, and wasn't very good about the every day thing then. Some of it is startling, but not in a bad way; my father was still alive then and so of course I referred to him, to talking to him, and so on. The whole process (the copying over, not diary-keeping in general, although that too) has become a little addictive. I'll probably do more tomorrow, if I get the chance, but I think I'm finished for tonight.

We actually put down a deposit on a car for K today, although we'll be looking more tomorrow. Her current car, a 1995 Chevy Cavalier with a dented in front fender, has now lost its air conditioning, which will cost maybe $800 to fix. No point in putting that much money in that old a car. (Over 110k miles on it.) We're looking for a decent used car that we can finance through the dealer, and we have one now (a Toyota), but we're going to look at Hondas tomorrow, and then go to her crazy college (see yesterday's entry) and then it's new tattoo time for me!

I'm going to read a bit now, I think. A Thousand Splendid Suns. Depressing, but very good.

WATCHING MASH :: ENTRY #1736

SIX! But I'm Not There.

So it's about 9:15, and I'm sitting in this training room over in Hackensack waiting for the big workshop to start. It's got 15 minutes to go. I've already checked my email (sadly, the Colleague had to have her dog put to sleep last night; he was elderly and very ill for some time), and gone through my Reader updates. I thought I'd share with you all throughout the day, if I get the chance.

First, I'm working at a desktop PC running Internet Explorer, so I'm out of my comfort zone. Not out of my familiarity zone, by any means, because actually that's my set-up at school (although I use Firefox there too, when I can), but this is a monitor sitting on top of the actual PC, so I'm kind of looking up, if you know what I mean, so I can read the screen through the lower part of my progressive bifocals. Not looking forward to this all day, and neither is my neck. And the toolbar is configured differently, so I assume I must be at a Vista machine, although I didn't notice anything different before I fired up the Internet. It's a nice looking screen, very clear, good font here, and keyboard has a nice feel to it, but it's just a little not-the-same, you know?

Up on the whiteboard, there's a listing of 10 class participants, only two of whom are here. (Ten minutes to go. Needless to say, I got here very early; the other woman already here was here before I was.) It looks like we're going to be creating our blogs at Yahoo, since the instructor has listed usernames and passwords for us. For today, I am officially "blogstudent2." I don't know that I've ever done a Yahoo blog, unless I know it as something else. Certainly, I've tried out many different systems over the years just to see what they're like.

I brought a snack with me, but I'm thinking I may just have it for lunch and not go to McDonald's, which is pretty close, but not close enough to walk, and I don't want to lose the rare parking space I was lucky to get by arriving here at the ass-crack of the day. It also looks like it's going to rain most of the day, but if it doesn't, I can walk to the Target while I'm munching my apple and granola bar. I don't know what I need there, or if I need anything, but I can certainly kill a half hour in Target any day of the week.

Okay, more people are filtering in now and everybody knows everyone else except me. These ladies -- all ladies, judging by the names on the board -- are greeting each other like long-lost pals. It's a little weird.

First break.

We had a little power point thingy with background on blogging, nothing I didn't know, really, but some theory and history. She gave us a couple of links to sites about the legal issues involved (such as safely blogging about your job), so I guess I ought to look that over at some point. We'll start up our little blogs after the break. Turns out we'll be using blogger after all; she just set up email addresses for us at Yahoo to use to set up at blogger so we don't have to use our real ones, for lesson purposes.

I think the thing that drew me to this class was that the title said something about Learn about Web 2.0! and I wanted to know what that is. Turns out it means the "live" Internet, the constant exchange of live blog information and RSS feeds and updating by the minute and participation by a wide group of people, as opposed to the static Internet where websites are created and managed by IT people and techs and website developers and the sites are relatively static. Okay, now I know. Can I go to Target? (I can see it from the window I'm sitting next to!)

Home. It was a long day in a cold room.

It wasn't a nice day to walk, and it turned out that once I got out on the street, I couldn't get my bearings and figure out how to get to Target! The streets around there are very wacko. I went back, got my car, killed some time over at T and still got back for the afternoon session with 15 minutes to spare.

I learned some RSS stuff that I didn't know, but nothing particularly useful to me (or you.) But it was not the worst way to spend a day. The instructor was the same one I had for the Dreamweaver workshop last year, and she's good. The aggravating thing about the day was getting email from the Colleague telling me that my library non-secretary is stirring up trouble again. Honestly, what is her problem? Yesterday, I worked out a whole procedure with the vice principal and than explained it all to this chicky-poo, no problem, and today she's running to the v.p.. explaining that it can't be done because of a, b, and c, all of which I've already taken care of and are no longer issues. I wasn't even there today and it was still annoying.

Now I am very, very tired and we are having pizza for dinner. I will have at least two slices. I may have three.


watching Reba :: entry #1495

SEVEN! Sort Of.

So school ends in seven days, although I won't be there tomorrow and I have to go in on the 8th day. Just so we're all clear on that. But here's the laugh. This workshop I'm going to tomorrow (which is actually two workshops, a morning and an afternoon) is something I signed up for months ago. The idea is to find workshops that are a) easy to get to, b) don't take up too much of your own time (say, in an evening), c) cheap enough for the district to be willing to let you go and pay you back for it, and d) on a topic that is somehow related to what you do, because, duh, they won't send you to one if they can't see a connection. I had already forgotten what I signed up for, although I knew it was vaguely computer or Internet related. So I checked my paperwork today, and this is what I'm going to learn:

Blog Workshop: Become a Part of Web 2.0 - in which we will create a blog

and

RSS - in which we will learn to manage information through RSS readers.

Hmmm.

There's more, and I'm sure some stuff I can learn, especially more details about the whole RSS thing (which I will share with you all), but I'm pretty sure I could teach the class on how to start a blog. But hey, you never know where you're going to pick up something useful. What I want to learn to do at this point, and I think I mentioned it the other day, is create a tag cloud, but I doubt I'll get anything on that. Actually, I think all I have to do is tinker with the HTML in that part of my template and take out what makes it a bulletted list. It wouldn't be the totally cool kind of tag cloud, where some words are bigger than others, but it wouldn't be a ten-inch long honking giant list, either.

In other news, I'm stuffed, but I'll bore you with the details at Meals Included, should anyone care. Please do not feel compelled to care, or even read. I should have called that site TMI 24/7. You get the picture.

I think tonight is going to be the last time I post an "update", as it were, at dland, to make my name turn red. From now on, please sign up for my Google Group or bookmark me or whatever you need to do, but if you visit here regularly, or from time to time, please don't forget about me! I'll post a link there to here, but I'm not going to try to put a ... oh, a thingy, I just lost the word, you know, that automatically sends you over here ... because I still link to some of my old entries there, and if I did that, put it in the template, there would be no way ever to see those old entries ... okay, I'm stumbling over myself now, but you get it.

Busy day at work today. But I think K's done subbing for the year; tomorrow is the last day of classes at the high school, and then four days of finals. Even if anyone is out, she's not at the top of the list of subs to be called. She didn't get a call today, and I missed her at lunch.

Oh, voodoo, Roseanne Roseannadanna was a character played by Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live in the 70's. She was part of their Weekend Update fake news segment, and did "feature" stories in which she whined endlessly about something or other, and often finished with the tagline "It's always something."

Keeping my fingers crossed for more than two hours of sleep tonight ...


watching The Simpsons :: entry #1494

Duh. And ... Help?

I just realized that when I post comments and such while I'm logged into Google, I often show up as "oldewoman" and not "purple chai". I'm still me. Those are my two main names (which have the same source, btw, the poem Warning: by Jenny Joseph), but this is just to tell you all that when you see "oldewoman" it's the same old purple chai from New Jersey. Okay, business taken care of.

But now .. I just don't see how you guys are importing your dland archives into wordpress. Can anyone give me a little lesson in it? I know you're importing them month by month, but I absolutely cannot find out how you're managine this neat trick. Any info would make my day!

watching SNL :: entry#1491

And Keeps on Ticking

Well, I finally figured out that the reason I'm in task overdrive mode, and probably the reason I gained two pounds that I can't shake, is the prednisone I'm taking for my non-hearing business. I have a list of things to do here beside me that I keep crossing off and adding to, and I went on one little errand this morning that blossomed into me power-walking through the mall, stopping here and there. It's enough, already. I wish I could just stop. I don't feel like, as my sister asked, I'm jumping out of my skin. Just like I keep finding more and more to do. When I was on the phone with her before, I was also walking around the room dusting. I know! So know you know the gravity of the situation.

I won't list for you all the things I did today because frankly, if I read it over next week, it'll probably scare me. (Just kidding.) Let's see where things are, then.

It's Saturday, so it's not a countdown day. I managed to stay in bed until 7.00 this morning, and I am so looking forward to when I can set my own sleep and wake-up times and move at a comfortable pace in the morning. That would be ... June 22, I guess. I do have those two workshop days the following week, but they probably won't start until 9.00, which is the shank of the day for me.

I've been putting the new hearing aids through their paces, as best I can, at least until the hearing problem cropped up again a few hours ago (but seems better now.) So far, they seem very good, but I'm reserving final judgment for at least a week. But one of the things on my list was to check them out with headphones on, and I know some of the music I've had trouble with (hearing both channels of the stereo), so that's what I put on, and oh .... it was just lovely. Walking around the house with the Beach Boys in my head ... I was so happy, just like that. I don't dance, you know, not like any kind of actual dance and not in public or anything, but when I'm alone and the music is loud enough and comes through clear, it's just joy, and I move like a goon and that's okay. Sometimes, hearing can be fun.

So here's a thought: I can't move my dland archives to blogspot, but maybe I can open another account at wordpress and move them there? To protect them? It's not like I think I wrote gold or anything, and I do have a backup, but I like to reference old entries sometimes, and I could just like there from here. Just thinking.

Toes with the Sibs tomorrow, and then the Great TV Migration, Phase Two, takes place. You may recall that R and I swapped TV's, but mine was too big for her place so I got her a new one and now I have to bring the other one back. Tomorrow, she and I will hustle that one down from the third floor and into my car, and then it sits on my living room floor. However. K got a game system today -- it's a Super Nintendo, don't laugh; long story -- that does not appear to work with the TV in her room upstairs. So perhaps we will be carrying the big black monster TV up there after all, but I'll have the sense to test the game thing on it before we take that trip. Either way, we'll have a spare TV in the house somewhere, big or small, depending on who wants what where. I'm just hoping I don't have a monster TV on my living room floor all summer. (Oh wait, I'll just take more prednisone and then I can move it anywhere I want. In the middle of the night. When I'm not sleeping, and have extra energy.)

NEWS FLASH FROM THE WEIRD PEOPLE ARE STILL WEIRD DEPARTMENT:

I just stopped typing for a few minutes when the MIL called and we chatted. The ILs, whom I love and am fond of, are still at the top of the "I just don't get it" list. So we're chatting, as we do, and I tell her nonsense about R has been decorating her place and K has been subbing and so on, and then she says, matter-of-factly, "Oh, we had a bit of excitement the other day" and proceeds to tell me that on Wednesday, she and the FIL were doing an errand, and he tripped in the parking lot and fell on his face. But he's okay.

WTF? And may I repeat: WHAT THE FUCK?

Lately, I am surrounded by stories of people I don't get, but this is my new favorite. Let's see. 79 year old, 350 pound man who walks with a cane and severe limp, falls in a parking lot, and neither he nor the missus thinks "Hey! Maybe we oughta call our son and tell him what happened!" Nooooo. Now she said that fortunately, three men rushed out of the store and helped him up, and that he was okay although his face was bruised, but they didn't go to the emergency room because he felt fine. (Let me just say that if no help had arrived, she would have had to call 911 just to pick him up, and then he would have gone to the hospital.) Well. For one, he wouldn't even know if his hip were broken, and his right hip ain't breaking anytime soon because it's titanium. For another, I can't see him breaking a rib because no pavement is finding his ribs under all that (although he could have hit a parking space barrier wrong, I guess.) For three, when people fall, especially elderly people, it's the internal damage you have to worry about. For the record, my mother died of cancer, but what she died of that day was that she fell the night before and she bled to death internally from injuries that weren't found until she finally agreed to go the emergency room the next morning. Oh, and she broke her elbow, but we didn't know that either. Anyway, here's the plan: if an elderly person falls, take him to the hospital.

Okay, I can pay bills or I can investigate my archive options. Just kidding, you know I'm heading right over to wordpress the minute I post. (And send out my notify! Thanks, one subscriber!)

watching Raymond :: entry #1490

Wait. IT GETS BETTER.

The wonderful golfwidow left this news in my comments:

It CAN work for Diaryland, if you enter the link manually as follows:

http://chailife.diaryland.com/index.rss

replacing "chailife" with the name of the diarist in question.

You won't get the full entry, because the RSS file doesn't generate it right (thanks again, Andrew) but you don't have to log into Diaryland to read people's diaries.

The only problem is that RSS files are not generated for locked diaries, so you might still want to log into D'Land to see if they updated. Me, I just add locked diaries to my browser's Favorites and check them manually, since D'Land doesn't let me comment on them anyway.

SO THERE YA GO!

So now, I am adding dlanders to my brandy-new Google Reader page, which I have courtesy of bluesleepy telling us all what a good idea it is, and when I get to be brave enough -- maybe in a week? -- I will actually take everyone off my dland buddies list except the locked up people. I'll work that way for now, I think. For now, I'm still going to post a link there when I update here (so I'll be red on your buddies list), but I'm also looking into using Google Groups as a mailing list. The one or two of you who'll remember my notify list disaster know I need to make this as simple as possible for me, because when I tried a notify list, I just never remembered to send out whatever it was I had to send. I need something automatic, which that blogarithm thing that I have there is, sort of, except it only updates once a day, which is a pain in the neck.

Okay, so what else can I tell you today? I was busy at work, which is good, and I wasn't itchy, but I was very, very tired. I just can't fall asleep until midnight, which is great if you can sleep til 8.00, like on a Sunday, but sucky if your alarm goes off at 5.15. Three weeks to go.

I went to pick up some prescriptions today after school, and the lady who works there, whose kids were in school with my kids so I know her forever, asked if I had plans for the summer. And I said, I plan to practice for retirement. *sigh*

Okay. Diaries to add to Reader. Group to create. Food blog to bitch in. Check.

watching The Simpsons :: entry #1485

While I Have the Chance

I'm having a strange day.

Without going into TMI detail -- although I'll tell you where you can find it -- I have spent a good part of the day either scratching or sleeping. Whatever I've got here, it is damn annoying. The only thing I can be pretty sure of is that since I've had it to one degree or another for over six weeks, I'm not having a life-threatening allergic reaction to something. I really think that this year, the seasonal allergies are just taking themselves out on my skin.

I've been in a quandry over my physical state in general, mostly my weight loss and lack thereof, and certainly keeping a diary has helped me in a lot of ways, so I thought I'd start a little blog on the side, just about my eating and weight and other stuff. It's not private -- it's here -- but I don't know that anyone else would be interested in reading it. It seems to be good for me to be writing it.

Also, it gave me a chance to try Wordpress, which seems to be where half the dland folk are going, either there or here at Blogspot. I wanted to compare. So far, they both seem okay. I do wish there was a way to bring my dland archives over here to Blogspot, though; I haven't found a way and I don't plan to move my regular diary to Wordpress. Well, at least dland finally let me download a backup, so I have that.

That's my update, such as it is. Time to go put on more benadryl ointment.

watching VH1 :: entry #1483

The Etiquette of Blog

[copied from dland]

I wrote in one of my first entries about how I had come to start keeping a web diary, and I continue to be intrigued by the process. Who reads these, and why? And now, a new question: what is the proper thing to do when the writer of the blog is no longer anonymous?

To recap, I stumbled onto this whole thing when I came across two web diaries that were being kept by students in the school where I work. One of these was the typical "Omigod I had a test tuday my teacher sux" and it was, thank god, written by someone I couldn't identify. The other turned out to be a continuing work of poetry by someone whose life I have become privileged to observe somewhat closer than I ever expected to. I read her writing and I look for her in the halls the next day, hoping to see that she is still happy, and still arm in arm with the sweet boy I know her to be in love with.

The mistake I made, I don't remember when, was in telling the SCM (Self-Centered Man) about it. I think I was just trying to demonstrate how this new search engine I'd found worked, and I told him that I had done a sample search on the name of our high school and that it turned up interesting results. The next day he asked if I too had begun to read S--'s web diary, as of course, I had.

I feel as if I have violated her privacy. Yes, I know she writes it and she posts it, but can she really expect that her teachers are reading it? I don't feel that I'm invading her space by reading it myself; oddly, this seems okay to me because I know I will never, would never, indicate to her in any way that I know what I know. But I cannot say the same for the SCM. He is curious and nosy. This is because he cannot estimate the damage that he might do by saying things, because if it isn't happening to him, it isn't happening. What if he sees her in the halls one day and says "Are you still seeing T--? Did you have a good time hiking at (wherever) last week? My wife and I like to hike there; when we went two years ago, we brought our dog, and she almost got sprayed by a skunk, although she didn't. But that was our old dog; we had to have her put to sleep last summer. She developed ............."

And so on. Because he really isn't interested in you at all, S--, he's just looking for a way to talk a little more about himself. And if knowing something about you gives him a hook to start talking, he'll use it. And he won't even notice that you are feeling open and exposed and violated.

So what's the etiquette here? If anyone knows, I'd sure like to hear your advice. I'm considering just telling SCM "You know, it's not polite to tell people you've been reading their blogs. It's really an anonymous kind of thing." Isn't it?


ENTRY #14

It's like Rear Window, but without the wheelchair or murder

Having spent some time in the last few days trying to get these pages to look the way I want them to look, it seemed like a good idea to look at other people's pages and figure out how they did what they did. I'm especially fascinated by the layouts, colors, things they chose to include and so on.

I thought a good way to find pages that might appeal to me where to go through the webrings that had titles I could relate to. (This was after spending two days going through the member directory at random, first the Ms, then the Ts, and so on.) So here are the webrings I looked at: all the ones with the word Mom or Mommy in the titles, and everything that said Disney or Mickey Mouse. Because that's a whole lot of who I am. I completely forgot until just now that I could have looked at the Star Trek rings; there's no chance that there isn't one. I also tried the Moody Blues ring.

Funny, these web rings. First, except for two of the mommy pages, not a damn one had anything to do with any of the webrings they were in. So I guess I don't get the webring thing.

Second, and I guess I'm not the first genius to figure this out, was that, after checking out the layout and all, I had to start reading the entries to see where was the mommy stuff, or mickey mouse, or whatever. So I've basically been spending the last couple of hours reading essentially random blogs.

In the Hitchcock movie Rear Window, a guy who basically refuses to get really involved in life finds himself with a broken leg and stuck in a wheelchair in his New York City apartment during a hot summer. He can't get out and he has to have the window open, looking out into a kind of courtyard the the other apartments also look out on. The plot is that he thinks he witnesses a murder and tries to prove it. But the magic of the story is that this uninvolved observer of life -- a professional photographer, hmm -- watches and watches these other people in other apartments go about living their ordinary lives. They are lonely, they are troubled, they argue, they live, they survive, they find love. (And he solves the murder, of course, and gets Grace Kelly, too.)

It is like reading these blogs, looking in at the ordinary lives of strangers by reading the little bits they leave for us. Some of them seem so personal and private, as if they were written because they needed to be, but not really for anyone else to read. And here I am reading them. Some of them are funny, and you know they were intended for an audience. Some of them are desperate, as in, I know I am alone and no one will ever see this. And I'm reading that.

Why am I reading that? Why am I spending my Sunday afternoon reading other people's blogs? Why am I sitting at the window? I don't have a broken leg.

entry #4

And the child shall lead

Although I had tried keeping a blog once before, over a year ago, I gave it up about a week later when buildings fell down in New York, about ten miles from here, and the world changed. I came back to it this week unexpectedly, and in an unexpected way.

Testing out a new search engine someone told me about, I put in the name of the high school where I work and got more results than I ever had seen before with any other search engine. Exploring some of these results, I came across two blogs that are written by girls who are students at the school.

It was revealing on many levels. Of course it was revealing of them as individuals. Although I can't tell who one of the girls is -- a generic first name, the expected lack of spelling, grammar, and punctuation, nothing written that would indicate who this unique individual might be -- the other is someone I know. I've run into her where she works, I know which clubs she belongs to at school. She is the only girl at school with her name. And so, she is revealed.

I have known her as a reasonably good student, a responsible girl, a good worker. I know her brothers, her parents from past years. She is pleasant and good-natured. I once taught her to make a web-page.

But her diary tells me that she is passionate, most especially about her friends and about someone she loves, or might love. Her diary tells me that she feels art and beauty. Her diary tells me that she writes with depth, not about James K. Polk or some other school-type thing. Her diary tells me that she knows the passion of living and can make that passion live in her words, and the way she makes her words do what she wants them to do. She writes with beauty and grace, and a style that is her own.

She has been revealed to me as a person of warmth, and depth, and of love and hurt, and of the fullness of what people are meant to be. And in so revealing herself, she has brought about something in me that is connected to that.

What do we reveal when we write? When we write in a diary or blog such as this, what do we hope to reveal to ourselves, and of course, to anyone else? Can my young writer from school know that I, one of her teachers, now knows the feelings she has chosen to reveal? Would she be embarrassed if she knew? Would she change what she has done, or do things differently from now on? I hope not.

I wish I could tell her that just reading her diary has revealed in me the seed of the thought that this is something that might work for me too. That I feel priveleged to have been allowed this look into her soul. That I admire what she has done, what she can do, and that I have learned from her.

In the first blog I looked at, I saw a 14 year old girl who was bored by school, annoyed by her f--ing math teacher, and who was killing time in Biology by writing a blog entry. I liked her honesty, and I respect her feelings. I remember those feelings, too. But I wish she would capitalize the word I, and throw in a comma here or there. Not because I want her writing to be correct, whatever that means; I just want it to be easier for me to read.

Both blogs expressed a more raw kind of revelation than I've ever really written myself, although I've been writing for almost all of my nearly 50 years. It is good to know that there is something I still need to learn, want to learn. One of things I like most about teaching is that I get to learn things from students, sometimes. It doesn't come up as often as I'd like it to, but it's a good thing, when it happens.

Thanks, girls.

entry #3

I still don't have a column of my own

Since it doesn't look like USA Today is giving me my own column anytime soon, and I'm unlikely to see myself sprawled across the side of a bus like Carrie on Sex and the City, if I want to write a column and whine about everything around me everywhere, it's going to have to be here. Since I tend to waver between crankiness and life-affirmation, sometimes minute-to-minute, what I put here is likely to be somewhat random, not to mention too wordy and perhaps not such a pleasure to read. This last sentence is probably the best description of myself I have ever put together. So here I go, blogging on.

entry #1