Long ago when I first read books about dogs, the standard advice was to give your new puppy a hot water bottle and a ticking clock, so it misses its mother less. As if any baby mammal can’t tell the difference.
I just checked, and they’ve upgraded the standard advice to at least putting the dog’s pen in your bedroom so it won’t be so lonely. “And if the dog cries, comfort him briefly but don’t make a big deal out of it.”
Still sounds like baby dog abuse to me.
It’s about instinct. A dog on its own is a dead dog. They need the pack. If they find themselves alone, their crying is for survival.
Can you make a human go to sleep in a hammock strung from a steel cable ten stories high? “GO TO SLEEP, stop whining, you’re perfectly safe.”
I say the humans should get their spoiled human self down there on the floor and get cozy!
Here’s the baby dog’s first night home. She had a lovely night and didn’t have to cry.
I slept on the floor with her for the first week, and after that she was comfortable and didn’t mind sleeping in her bed.
Here’s how to tell it’s going to be a grand day!
The baby dog in the car on my lap, on her first ride home.
The baby dog in the car on my lap to ride everywhere!
If she isn’t allowed in my lap for some reason, she’s sad đ It’s baby dog abuse, isn’t it đ It doesn’t happen often since my wardrobe now is chosen for how it will look covered in black hair and paw prints, but still, sometimes…
I didn’t pose this, but here she is along with the shopping bag made out of her dog food bag!
I remember ripping an ad out of an old magazine when I was a kid. I don’t know where the picture went. When the internet became a thing, I started looking for it online but never with any luck, until I just today thought of asking the AI.
Me: Can you find a picture for me? It was in a magazine I saw back in the 80s (but could have been from an older magazine) I think it was an ad for some kind of whiskey. It had a mountain man out in the woods wearing a long fur coat.
ChatGPT: Iâm pretty sure youâre remembering the Yukon Jack campaignâtagline âThe Black Sheep of Canadian Liquors.â Late-70s/early-80s print ads often showed a fur-clad trapper/mountain man by a snowy lake or forest, sometimes quoting Robert Service. Here are examples of the exact layout and imagery from that series.
Me: YES THAT’S IT!!!! That’s wonderful, thank you, I always thought that looked so romantic.
ChatGPT said: Iâm glad I could track it down for you! âš Those old Yukon Jack ads really leaned into that rugged, romantic frontier vibeâhalf whiskey promotion, half daydream of living out in the wild with a fur coat and a campfire.
HA. The machine gets it!
Yes indeed. I remember looking at that ad as a teenage girl and thinking that there is a real man, who no doubt sewed that coat together himself, out of the skins of things that tried, and failed, to eat him.
I’ve been looking for that ad since my darling started talking about Alaska. He was going to go up to Alaska in an old wood boat to see if he could survive the winter.
I didn’t miss that “IF”.
Well, the boat part didn’t work out.
(NO to Alaska esp after he told me it’s rainier than western Washington!)
But we got the woods and the snow and the c-c-c-cold!
Scroll down to “How to Switch Template Designs” and watch the 19 second silent video.
OH.
Didn’t know that was there. ALL THIS TIME THAT WAS THERE AND I DIDN’T KNOW and it’s not like “you’ve had the ruby slippers on your feet all this time, but you wouldn’t have believed.”
I would have believed. I just didn’t notice.
And really that’s the key, the one that turns everything on. Notice the difference between those two tabs and how to move around them, and the options open up. You kinda gotta know that.
I’m finally figuring out TwentyTwentyFive and LOVING it! (I went to Carolina Nymark’s blog and read some of her posts, including one with a tragic long ago love story with a boy with a terminal illness that nearly made me cry. I love reading the good stuff from random strangers) and I love T25.
I’m not going to say it was easy to figure out – the key above is necessary and is non-obvious – but two hours work max, and I’m getting it. I have T25 on JWH, Playground and Friends and I feel like I’ll never need another theme. (I “know how” to work with CSS but if you don’t do it regularly, you forget the details.)
In the olden days, installing WP was hard, then cropping an image was easy. Now installing WP is easy, then it takes, well, at least more than just a casual glance, to figure out how to change things. Once you do WOW, so much power and possibilities!
So with a little fiddling, I can make my theme look how it’s supposed to, like a 1990’s girl crafts website with a floral allover background again XD
I still have my FABBDAlous background! And AI just made me a cool blue vines tile for JWH, too. I didn’t have to go searching, or create it myself.
Here’s what I was gonna post. (I’ll put the bitching after.)
I was gonna say something along the lines: “VASAviation, first best source for airplane oops news! The airline hasn’t released the gender of the pilots yet but it’s not all female, like the silly videos going around that Jeff’s been watching claim. You can hear the cockpit chaos and the yelling is male. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if sober, rested, well paid, grown up white men who had been hired for their test scores had never managed to oops an airplane?”
But X.com told me “you have reached your daily limit for this action. Add your phone number to remove the limit” when I hadn’t even (successfully) posted anything (it was 6:15 am when I started this process).
And why do they need my phone number?
I’ve had a NO going on about that since always. See post from 2012 when White Mountain Puzzles wouldn’t mail the (physical, tangible) jigsaw puzzle I had ordered unless I gave them a phone number.
All of my enemies already have my phone number, I just don’t like the cheek of these small time entities who think disclosure should be default.
Oh yeah, back when I was wondering why the Trumpster doesn’t have his own site? Then he made one. I tried to join it, just out of idle curiosity. Nope, not without a phone number and YOUR FREE GOOGLE VOICE NUMBER ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH IT HAS TO BE YOUR REAL ONE.
Not that curious.
My darling gets up and vaguely remembers me playing him cockpit recordings at 5am. He says, “So, you came across some phony recording with voice actors, claiming that wasn’t a planeful of girls?”
[Edit end of Mar 2025 – to add the funniest thing I ever saw in my LIFE, in perfect whiteguy-ese!
<– end of edit]
Okay let’s share stuff.
I decided to switch over and be an X fangirl when I heard about Elon Musk refusing to censor reality! And posted away, happily, for a while, but now they want my phone number, so I’m out on the sidewalk. Again.
Here’s what I would have shared on X today.
Cried. I WEPT over that. So much sadness. The glory of an era being led away to her grave, and still beautiful.
When you’re done crying, read the top comments and get ready to bawl some more as the old mariners put the sadness into poetry.
Look at that beautiful ship compared with one of the silly new ones in the background, and she was double the speed, too.
Edit: I stand corrected and beg your pardon. The purpose of a cruise ship is not to get from point A to point B, so the speed doesn’t matter. The cruise ship is itself part of the destination, so it’s okay if it goes at the speed of the floating apartment complex it resembles.
United States could cross the ocean in four days. Compare to QM2 (now our last ocean liner) that does it in seven, but again, probably okay since it’s for people for whom time is not the biggest factor. Is your first thought that money might be? But QM2 isn’t more expensive than a flight! –as long as you buddy up, since it’s ppdo.
I think I shared this at one point. It’s 15 seconds of intense life lesson to not do things you’re not supposed to do.
And a funny. Perfect white people entertainment, there. Watch to the end.
Cuz I need a featured image for my index page feng shui. Boy is that image from old times to have Google Plus on it. I miss Google Plus. I’ve been floundering around ever since that went byebye.
Yikes! Iâve gone silent again. This must be resisted.
Of course itâs all more difficult now. There are more steps between me and communication. That doesnât mean it canât be done. Say âNOâ to a huge explanation of how the silence came about. Pick a topic and start talking. Laundry!
Dry camping is no big deal. They had it tougher crossing the prairies, and yet they managed to post on their blogs, using cast-iron tools. I can, too. And I can do the laundry. When we first came here, we used the laundromat in town but… come on. No fun.
The laundromat’s kinda yucky, and the atmosphere is hit or miss. The last time I went, there was a mated pair having such intense disharmony that it had to be carried on right there in front of the dryers, in accusing, bitter tones. I didn’t need to understand the language to get the general drift. I felt only slightly more miserable having to stay there and witness it than the principals sounded carrying it on.
After that I came home, squirted some blue Dawn in a bucket of water, washed my clothes and hung them on the line. It was one dress, a pair of socks and a couple washcloths, and hanging on a line in the woods looked so picturesque I could have just exploded with how cute it was and how proud I was of myself. Why didnât I take a picture? Anyway I took a picture several loads later, when it was becoming a thing and I was getting my act together.
I found a new gadget for laundry! Turns out they had them in olden times. Iâve seen them in museums and not known what they were. âCone-shaped thing on a long stick.â
This isn’t an ad. I put this picture here. This fellow’s face expresses my feelings better than my face would.
In retrospect, after using it several times and figuring out how to be more efficient about everything, I didnât really need it. One of Jeffâs old oars works about as well for skooshing the clothes around in the tub. Modern laundry soap is what really does the job. But the gadget helped with hope and enthusiasm at the beginning, so that was good.
The “backbreaking labor” part of the proposition is not so much the scrubbing, but the lifting and wringing of wet clothes. They get sooooo heavy, esp the denim trousers and flannel sheets. I could buy a wringer sometime maybe.
Meanwhile, that big black container in the center of the picture is a garden pot that had a bunch of holes drilled in it. I drilled even more holes, coiled a big rope on the ground beneath it, dumped my sopping wet clothes in there, and stomped around on em with my bare feet as if treading out the wine. That gets them quite well squeezed out.
On my first try, that folding plastic table was too low, so I was bent over to scrub, and that contributed to the exhaustion. Now there’s a great pallet that Jeff fixed for me that puts the table at the perfect height.
So. First I inspect the item for stains, because they donât show when it gets wet. Then wet it, put it on the table and scrub those spots with a brush dipped in diluted dish soap (easy on the hands). Then the clothes go into a 5-gal bucket with modern commercial laundry detergent. Yay for chemicals! Hands donât go in there. Skoosh with the gadget for a few minutes. Leave and do something else while it all soaks. Come back and skoosh some more, then dump the whole load into the drainer. Do something else. Come back and throw the mostly-dripped clothes into the rinse water. Then back in the drainer and stomp all over them! Rinse again, stomp again. That gets the heavy weight of water out but theyâre still wet, so I throw the garments on the line sideways. They’re going to stretch out, but it’s okay because they’re stretching widthwise. I come back after they’ve dried a bit and rotate them.
And fun??? Absolutely delightful. I wake up in the morning on laundry day like, “oh boy guess what I get to do today!!” In my lovely sunny woods with my dog wanting the stick thrown and my husband working nearby. He even told me once that I look cute doing the laundry.
đ„°
The biggest surprise from all this is the PRIDE when you wash clothes yourself. Can’t say “oh the washer didn’t get it very clean.” If it isn’t very clean, nobody failed but me. So I get the stains out. Jeff’s heavy carpenter jeans come out CLEAN and bright blue. His white t-shirts come out mostly sparkling white, at least no longer as icky looking as formerly. He told me when I started trying this that if the clothes just come out not sweaty any more, that’s all we need. I never expected my washing to be cleanER.
I took this picture of the 7-gal boxes we use for carrying the potable water inside. Thereâs other water in those big square IBC tanks for laundry. We use the IBC to carry water up from town, then drain it into the big potable tank, that Jeff put such a lovely modern faucet on, that I can connect a hose and fill the boxes up myself. The leftover water in the IBC is for doing laundry with.
Itâs all so much fun! So independent! We are pioneers.
We had to walk away from all that other nonsense and just head out west (it was located towards the east) and start a new life. Hard work is part of the deal but thatâs okay. We can hold our heads up now. It was TEOTWAWKI, the end of the world as we knew it.
Both of us were preppers in our own little way, and now itâs time to use all those things weâd been collecting. Jeffâs old manual tools and my manual sewing machine come in handy. Wool blankets and candles are useful now.
I think we have maybe more practical skills than average, and yet when we got out here and actually tried it, we did some things the dumb way or the hard way at first.
Everybody wants to do this! And yet, if things hadnât gone wrong just right in our last gig, we wouldnât have âhad no choice butâ to come out here and sink or swim.
Iâve always wanted to head for the wild woods and carve out a home, but when the time came for it to begin to be reality, I might have chickened out, if I could have.
Some people have to play games like these to simulate this experience. We’re doing it!
There we are. That’s my darling and me.
That one had on its loading screen, âAll we need is love! And wide-open spaces of prairie.â
We have love and just a little patch of woods đ
Wow I’ve been having technology adventures! I talked about the printer already, or maybe I have yet to. Then there’s the phone. I had to switch to Verizon, and my Galaxy A11 wasn’t compatible. Long story and a couple hundred bucks in fees for the new free phone, I guess it’s all settled down now, and my data works better. We have cell service only when we plug in the signal booster.
We were so leery about that “WE Boost”, since we’d read so many bad reviews, and we unpacked it carefully, keeping all the material for the return we fully expected, but then plugged it in et voila, five bars! It works great, but boy, it sucks the juice. My little folding solar panel is enough for our needs if we’re very conservative and if I’m out there babysitting it all day long, moving it to wherever the sun’s shining, but I can’t run the booster for very long. The idea is plug it in, download a bunch of stuff, unplug.
We have to work for our communication, here. That’s part of why I needed “Playground” set up with the Postie plugin so I can post by email with pictures. I can compose offline at leisure, then upload everything efficiently. It’s good! At least it’s better than writing by hand and then waiting for your friends’ reply to come around the Horn.
It’s not really 1840.
Question for self. “If you COULD suddenly be in 1840, would you?”
My mother would let us pick our birthday cake. My sister always had Bonbon Ribbon Torte (layers of thin cookie with raspberry sauce and whipped cream), my brother liked pineapple upside down cake, and I wanted chocolate chip cake. The recipe was something my sister clipped out of a magazine back in the 60s.
Here we are.
Chocolate Chip Cake
2 eggs 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 tsp vanilla 1 cup sour cream 1 tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda 2 cups flour 12 oz choc chips
Cream soft ingredients together, combine dry and mix.
Bake in greased and floured cake pan at 350° for 45 min or until a toothpick comes out clean.
I had a butterfly apron I couldn’t use for an apron because I don’t like the shape. I was waiting for some use for the butterflies as motifs. Finally, the first use! Patching a hole in a screen. I zigzagged around the butterfly, then tacked it to the screen by hand. When the sun comes through, it looks intentional!
Kind reproducing after kind, is that even allowed these days?
It’s a lovely, wholesome concept from a game!
Just like me and my sweetie đ
That’s us! That’s exactly what it feels like!
I haven’t gotten over being grateful that I get to experience a lovely relationship with a sweet, understanding man of my own free choice. I married him because I wanted to and because I thought it was a good idea. Everybody should do that at least once in life!
Messing around with WordPress and having SO MUCH FUN!
I was recently upgraded to version 6.1 while I wasn’t watching (away from keyboard for a while, but automatic updates had been left on) and wouldn’t be all that happy about it except that I’m a WP fan and therefore enthusiastic about whatever they do. Full site editing is the latest thing. I tangled with that for a whole day or two without any luck, then after banging my head against every wall in sight, discovered a series of useful new-to-me things, both related and un.
I had recently installed a WP for my Vicky, promising her that it’s easy and fun and then it turned into everything else but that, because it only takes a few months to suddenly not know what you’re doing any more. Full site editing is too bleeding edge for me, I guess.
But Vicky came up with the FAIRY theme, and it’s every bit as clean and simple as the Basic theme (no kidding, that’s the name of it) that I had been using before, but more up to date. We’re back to the good old days of crop a banner to these dimensions, pick some colors and then get on with our lives. It took me half an hour to produce a brilliant pink candy cane theme from a random image of flowers from Wiki Commons.
To get the images right I downloaded a bunch of “free, easy” image crop things, but eventually they all failed and I had to revert to ibisPaint. I had been avoiding that because I didn’t know how to use it, but after ten minutes of really trying, I started to get it to work and it’s AMAZING and does so much more, not only cropping to dimensions, but semi-transparent layers, clone brushing, etc. And it works offline! I have a new tool!
Speaking of offline. I’ve been wishing and searching for some way to compose posts offline, other than copying and pasting text and assembling with pictures later. Up at my cold new home there’s just one place on the hill where the phone gets signal, not enough to make calls, but texts go through, and emails if they’re brief enough. I can even load images if they’re small enough. But it’s so cold! I don’t want to stand out there a minute longer than necessary. I’d like to compose a post inside where it’s warm, then go outside to the signal spot and hit UPLOAD. I still need to share my fabbdalous nonsense with the world!
The WordPress app does work offline, for composing posts, and queuing images for upload, but cannot, as far as I can see, do both at the same time. Can’t add an image from your device into the post and then upload – or it’s, “failure: image not loaded”. Also can’t upload images in one session and add them to the post in the next – the Media tab forgets them and there’s no way to insert them because, “failure: not connected”. Hmph.
Bouncing around ideas, I even thought for a while of good old html and a text editor. I could share a link to a directory with some basic pages and pictures, then go up to the phone zone, fire up FTP and… argh, there we are, fiddling in the cold with hurting fingers.
Then I found the solution! Posting by email, YAYYY! The “Postie” plugin. They mention “journalists in foreign countries” as the ones who may find this feature useful, but it’s also cool in other cold places, like up on my hill where EMFs are only frying your brains, just a little bit, in one spot.
Now I have this FABBDAlous new theme, AND I can throw some content at it from anywhere!
That came from https://imagecolorpicker.com/ analyzing my picture of flowers. One of the light pinks happens to be #fabbda.
UPDATE:
Nov 2023. Found out Fairy is nagware, and there’s no rage like love to hatred turned. Just when I thought the whole theme thing was settled and not on my to-do list any more, Fairy started popping up with the most ANNOYING messages, top and center of the WP dashboard:
“Hey there! We notice you’ve been using Fairy for some time…” and a request for payment. The way it’s phrased reminds me of a security guard posted at the store entrance: “Hey there! I notice you have an item tucked under your arm…”
I complained on the Fairy theme message board and had a long, frustrating convo with the devs who insist the messages can be got rid of. Sure they can, until next time you sign in.
Anger about that was just the motivation I needed to get me off my lazy butt and do a little bit of reading about FSE. Guess what, I figured it out!
I’m now using Twenty Twenty Three and absolutely love it. Just a bit of work to get over the hump, and now I feel like WordPress is back the way it should have been all along except UNLIMITED power and control. You can make your site look exactly the way you envisioned it, starting from scratch, as easy as drawing a layout on a blank canvas. This is better than CSS alone, better than any super-customizer theme (I’ve tried all of those). You can customize as much or as little as you please.
Wah-hoo, I’m so excited about 6.2! By the time I write this, 6.4 and it just keeps getting better and better.
