Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

This site has been rated by Blogged.com. I’m right up there in the cats category with I Can Has Cheezburger and Stuff On My Cat. I am suitably amused and flattered. Somehow my personal blog has become “Monster Cat Central”… I know of several places where the links simply say “Monster Cat” rather than “Carla” or “Miscellany.” My cat has eclipsed me. My random musings on road trips, entertainment and politics are simply insignificant codas to his comic features. Somehow, I think I can deal with this.

I’m sure this will be going straight to Mr. Paw’s head.

tags: blogged.com, cats, monster cat, random, self-referential

Yes, I expect tomorrow when we get home there will be some very whiny cats indeed. Tenny will howl like he’s been imprisoned for decades, get some attention then ignore me for the evening. Then he’ll be all in my face when I go to bed… Evil will insist on fresh food, lots of attention and goodness knows what else.

There was a little blip of technical difficulty with this site this morning and probably last night. The offending plug-in has been nuked and de-config’d. Shouldn’t be a problem again. I even fixed it before having coffee… which reminds me, I should have coffee now.

Happy Friday, all!

More comics at: The Chronicles of Monster Cat

tags: blog, cats, comics, monster cat, silly, technical difficulties, tennyson

The good news is:

• I am over my post-Pennsic cold.
• I have been exercising regularly since I could breathe again.
• I’m actually eating like an adult lately.
• Work hasn’t exploded. In fact, there have been just enough crazy moments to keep me entertained this month.
• I have rediscovered the glory of teatime.
• Threadless T-shirts is having their $10 sale. For those unfamiliar, Threadless produces small runs of amusing and random shirts such as Emo Bear, Diabolical Hot dog and, my personal favorite, the Loch Ness Imposter. I find their shirts run a little small, so if you want to be carefree and use your dryer on them, order a size up.

The bad news is

• I have a case of the blahs.
• My car is still in need of a knock sensor (but it’s not like I drive it much).
• Pennsic Laundry still haunts me.
• I really need the upcoming long weekend.

Good out-numbers bad, I’m stopping here.

tags: blah, car, food, laundry, random, sick, teatime, threadless, work

Explosives, light and cameras, oh my!
I’ve posted a set of my fireworks pics from last week. These are all from the Upper Darby display on the 1st. We saw fireworks on the 4th but it was raining so I didn’t pull out the camera. I’m definitely going to take my tripod next year! Fritz has some awesome fireworks shots up as well (they’re up over here too). You can never have too many fabulous fireworks photos to distract you, right? Most of Fritz’s photographs actually look like fireworks and are totally amazing. (And they are exactly what convinced me that I need to take my tripod next year!)

Several of my photos look odd and funky - vaguely like sci-fi sky vistas from a far-away planet. That’s part of the fun though - seeing how the random shots come out and how even the ones that aren’t strictly “good” make your imagination wander much like your imagination gets going during the display itself. There’s something about fireworks that just inspires glee in my heart. I think I mentioned that I had my screen saver using the fireworks photos. Seeing them drifting across the screen when I glance over at the Mac while working is fun.

Visitors for the new guest room!
Jon and Kirsten arrived last week on the 4th proper and we settled them into to the freshly painted guest room! The baby animals are gone and the walls all have fresh sheetrock and are a lovely blue!! (Before/beige and after/blue pictures! Remarkably the rug still kinda works.) This also means the walls are smooth and mostly flat! Very exciting for our rather unique house. The contractors have another week or so until they finish up the master bath and patch the ceiling and paint in the dining room. The celery-hay color got old and I need it to go away! We picked a sagey green for the walls and will be keeping the trim white. It’ll be nice to get an even coat of paint on the walls. I might even put up curtains after this! (Don’t hold your breath!)

Excursions while Jon and Kirsten were here included Independence Mall, the Liberty Bell, Monk’s, the Japan House (the koi have grown) and a vain attempt to see the Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute. Alas I had not grasped that the tickets had times attached to them and we didn’t have quite enough time to wait for the next available slot. And probably the week of the 4th isn’t the best time to be trying to see the big sights in Philly… But at least it wasn’t as hot as last time they visited us!

Weather = too hot
This week is as hot as the last time Jon and Kirsten came to visit. It’s 100° F out there and the heat is staying through Wednesday. The National Weather service has had a heat advisory in effect since yesterday. In short, it’s bloody hot.

I’m missing the WebCT reunion tonight, which is kind of a bummer but I really couldn’t justify a trip to Boston with how work is going this month. Next week I’ll be in Connecticut for meetings and stuff - if only they hadn’t been rescheduled! (Originally they were scheduled for this week so I would have been up in the area for the reunion…)

June Stats!
Oh hey, I’ve been meaning to post these too…

June Stats:

• Flickr: 8 new photos, 184 unique visitors.
• Miscellaney of a Cheshire Cat: 13 new posts, 7707 hits.

tags: 4th of july, fireworks, fourth of july, heat, home improvement, house, liberty bell, philadelphia, photography, sight seeing, statistics, visitors, weather, webct

“Kerfuffle” is my word of the day. I think it’s a fabulous word - fun to say and write - plus it accurately describes many of the firedrills I deal with at work without increasing the alarm, stress or chaos of the situation. Sometimes, using “kerfuffle” is even understatement. Expressive without overt sarcasm!

kerfuffle: (Scottish descent) a disorderly outburst, tumult or fuss. In other words, a small dose of chaos. synonyms: stir, to-do, distruption, disturbance, flutter.

It’s not a very formal word, but it’s a British import and underused as well which somehow makes “kerfuffle” slightly more acceptable to the people I keep using it with. It seems to put the chaos in appropriate perspective. What fascinates me about the questions and issues I’m fielding this week is that so many are just a matter of pointing out the trees to folks who are only seeing the forest. Even I am looking to provide more complicated answers to some of the questions and only to have someone say, “That’s what I needed to know!” while I was still talking through the background information I had. I feel useful at least!

Oh, since it’s actually June now…

May Stats:

• Flickr: 33 new photos, 355 unique visitors.
• Miscellaney of a Cheshire Cat: 14 new posts, 4929 hits.

Am I the only one having a hard time grasping that it’s June and essentially summer and such? On one hand, it’s hard to believe it’s June but on the other it feels like it’s been summer for ages. It’s been cooler the last day or so, but it’s been in the 80s here since early May and April was pretty warm too. The National Weather Service has already issued a heat advisory for tomorrow. Ugh.

tags: heat, kerfuffle, language, statistics, weather, words, work

There are an obnoxious number of cherry trees lining the street along the graveyard. The street is lined with trees that have been attacked with pink at the moment. The grass is littered with pink petals. Walking under the trees today resulted in petals stuck in my hair. I’m torn between being excited by their springtime grandeur and sickened by the concentration of pink. (It’s a lot of pink… at least a half mile. Though there are 2 trees blooming in white to break it up a little.) The trees are very exuberant this time of year.

Computer drama of the week…

Unsurprisingly, I dislike calling IT Help Desks. I would prefer to solve issues myself. Oh, and I have a little too much insight into the mind of an IT support person. The Help Desk at the company I’m currently working for is actually quite good, responsive and clueful, honestly… but that doesn’t make calling them with a randomly freezing laptop any happier. Yesterday morning, my laptop started to freeze up. I gave it a timeout over lunch (off, unplugged, battery out). Sadly, it didn’t magically fix the problem. I did successfully get the presentation I’m currently working on for Friday off the drive before it crashed for the 12th time. I called the Help Desk. The nice support guy thought it might be my hard drive and escalated me (with a very high priority) to an appropriate tech.

The tech timed his call perfectly - calling right after my afternoon meeting. (Doing a meeting blind when you’re supposed to be introducing the ins and outs of a new presentation? Not fun.) He agreed with the hard drive diagnosis (I was still desperately hoping for a video driver issue) and asked how soon I could get it to him. I overnighted it to him and he received it today. Apparently my laptop is toast. Poor little laptop. He thinks he can save my data though, so all is not lost (literally and figuratively). I think I’ll have a new-to-me laptop in my hands by the end of the week. In the meantime I get to limp along with temporary access to my e-mail via a web client that times out every 30 seconds. Irritating, but at least I can still work!

April Stats:

• Flickr: 40 new photos, 300 hits.
• Miscellaney of a Cheshire Cat: 12 new posts, 5458 hits.

tags: cherry blossoms, laptop, pink, spring, statistics, tech support, work

Apparently I was quiet this month but ended up with a traffic spike anyway.

• 191 hits and 25 new photos added to Flickr
  
• 4260 hits to 8 posts on Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

Really, I suspect that the crawlers found my site and bsuite is picking up those hits. (Or GoogleAnalytics is missing a ton of hits somehow…)

I have bunches and bunches of photos from the past week that I haven’t sorted through yet!

tags: statistics

February stats because vanity is part and parcel of having a blog!

• 189 hits and 21 new photos added to Flickr
  
• 1319 hits to 17 posts on Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

Yesterday (since that’s when I started writing this) was a very blustery day. The sky was a stoic blue, bright and flat with a hint of a gray undertone. It was trying not to give away its secret but I already knew that snow was in the forecast for today! Another inch or two will bring back winter nicely. The church across the way was still showing its petticoats yesterday at least: the last bits of snow are evident along the shaded side of the building in among the shrubbery.

This morning I woke up to snow. Looks like the plaid children have a snow day. (For the uninitiated, the plaid children are the students at the Catholic school at the church across the street.) The traffic reports sound horrible this morning too. There’s not that much snow here yet - just enough to make a mottled white and green mess of the lawn. But sometimes that’s more than enough to screw up traffic. Later maybe I’ll post some real content but now: time for coffee!
Technorati Profile

tags: snow, statistics, weather

I swear this peacock’s colors got even more vibrant for winter. I couldn’t convince him to wander across the snow though. I guess it was too cold on his toes! This photo is from my birthday trip to the zoo. I had such a great time wandering around the mostly-empty zoo. Sure, it was chilly, but there were no gaggles of people in my way! I was actually surprised to see the peacocks out and around since temperatures were below freezing and pretty windy.

I spent this week working up in Connecticut. I even had the foresight to prep the zoo photos I wanted to post so that I could blog them during the week! But, alas, the travel, the cold and long days kept me from getting much blogging done. Okay, the book I was sucked into might have had something to do with it too. One of the reasons I switched to reading short stories was that it’s easier to put down a short story and it ends faster. Not so much with really good sci-fi novels.

So, in the interest of kicking my butt into posting again, here are the January stats!

• 240* hits and 57 new photos added to Flickr
  
• 1471 hits to 15 posts on Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

* Approximate since I forgot to look what I started January with. I seem to remember it was just short of 500 hits.

Not too bad for the first month of this little blog. I want to fidget more with the layout and colors more. On one hand, I like the color scheme and clean white background. On the other hand, I love viewing photos on black backgrounds. I am indeed torn.

tags: peacock, philadelphia zoo, snow, statistics, travel, weather, winter, work, zoo