I’m moving all the posts from my old website to this one. These were mostly miscellanea I uploaded for testing.
Isn’t this the perfect pinecone? Freshly fallen, nicely rounded, light color brown.
I love pine trees. It’s been so long since I was among them! Just those stupid boring Douglas firs on the other side.
Only after posting the picture I notice you can see the patch on my skirt. “Sign of authenticity.”
This is my faithful sweet puppy, Peanut. I bring him with me everywhere because he’s shaped like the perfect neck pillow 🙂
I was keeping an eye open for a larger ash pan, and here’s this huge thing at Costco. So beautiful with a refreshing winter scene with nothing about Christmas. Nowadays metal ash pans come with bonus cookies inside them.
Here’s the cool pink wedge I bought!
I bought my darling a new felling wedge and then immediately ruined it myself by using it for splitting because there weren’t any steel ones around. I was “only going to use it to push the two pieces apart” and then used it for several and then got mad at a certain round that didn’t want to be splat (proper English past tense of split) and cracked the thin edge. So I was on the lookout for a new one, and this was half the price of most of them and PINK.
Later learned you can actually grind down and sharpen the edges of those things just as if they were steel instead of plastic, so the other one isn’t a total loss and this just adds to his collection!
It’s the thickest heaviest flannel I’ve ever come across. It’s a queen size flat sheet and it is absolutely going to end up as a dress with long sleeves.
ChatGPT takes a crack at it –
Ummmmm wut? That’s pretty, but I want the stripes going vertically.
Okay!
Oh, boy, ChatGPT.
There was lots of attempts to explain in words.
How about another AI? “thenewblack” gives a free sample.
THAT’S what I had in mind!
Then I realized I gave that AI an advantage because I rotated and cropped the image of the fabric first. I explained to ChatGPT that it was an image of a folded sheet, buuuut… baby steps.
Given the same advantage to start with, ChatGPT does better. But unfortunately I said “illustration” and I didn’t say “a girl wearing…” and that’s the end of my free images for today.
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.
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.
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 will miss its mother less. As if any baby mammal would not be able to tell the difference between a mother and a clock.
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 hung from a steel cable ten stories high? “GO TO SLEEP, stop whining, you’re perfectly safe.”
I say the humans should put their spoiled human self down there on the floor and comfort that poor critter. Here’s my baby dog’s first night home. We had a lovely night.
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!
Here’s the baby dog having her first ride home.
Now she rides on my lap to everywhere!
If she isn’t allowed in my lap for some reason, she’s sad. It’s baby dog abuse 🙁 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…
That’s the baby dog’s idea of staying in the back seat.
“Why don’t you love me any more Mommy :-(”
I didn’t pose this one, but here she is along with the shopping bag I made out of her dog food bag!
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 🙂
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!
