Flashback Friday

I think he was just in disguise so he wouldn’t end up on end up someone’s Thanksgiving table to be cut up and consumed! Obviously it worked, right?

WordPress TV

Ooooooohhh my gosh… I just watched a question and answer session with the young man, brilliant young man who created WordPress. It was mesmerizing! I am such a novice, and every time I think I’ve figured out how something works or discovered another function WP will perform, I get so excited on the one hand and quite baffled on the other. The more I learn about WP, the more I realize I don’t know. It’s kind of like when I went back to college in my 40’s to finish my bachelor’s degree, I was learning so much so quickly that I was swept up in the rush of “being among the learned”. Then at some point I realized that the more I learned, the more I realized how much there is that I don’t know, and it’s a very negative thing of which to become aware. But I also realized that the only way to go is forward. It is daunting when you realize how far there is to go on this learning journey. Just that realization can become an excuse to give up, thinking, “I’ll never get to the end of this. It will always remain beyond my reach!” But it is that same realization which can trigger the desire to become a lifelong learner, a mandate for every conscientious thinking person in our modern world. It’s a negative that becomes a positive. As he said in his WordPress session, it’s “a bad idea that becomes a good idea”.

Blindly Blogging

I wish I could say I’ve got this blogging thing down pat, but I still get confused logging in sometimes. Well…not really logging in, which I finally accomplished on my laptop. Problem was I’ve only ever logged in on my smartphone, and written all my blogs on it as well. I’ve been trying to switch to my PC so I am able to write faster. I do very well on the smartphone, it’s amazing to me. But it still doesn’t compare to speed I can reach on a regular keyboard. So I’m very happy to be here finally. I fear I installed some programs on my laptop that do not need to be here. Since I couldn’t seem to log in (I began trying about an hour ago), I thought maybe I needed to download WordPress onto my computer. What a disaster that was. I ended up downloading something called Inbox.com. I have no clue where that came from, only that when I tried to install WordPress, it automatically went to Inbox.com.

Among the many files and folders downloaded to my computer while I was stumbling around trying to get to my blog (which is all I really wanted to do in the first place so I could blog about my upcoming 9-hour drive and three-week stay with my son’s wife and their two little boys, which is a long and quite interesting story in itself) …but I’m getting ahead of myself here. Back to my downloaded files.

As I said, one of the files I found was a wordpress/readme file which has the WordPress Logo at the top, then Version 3.6 under that, and then Semantic Personal Publishing Platform which bedazzled me immediately. I can understand Personal Publishing (and that sounds inviting to me), it’s Semantic Personal Publishing that’s actually a Platform. What in the world does that mean?

But then… there’s a lovely Welcome paragraph called First Things First by Matt Mullenweg, one of the developer’s of WordPress. I’d seen him doing a presentation with a question and answer session (most of which, admittedly, I didn’t comprehend), on a video I found somewhere on my blog site just listed as WordPress.tv I think. The video intrigued me even if most of it was way over my head. I got a much better picture in my mind of what WordPress is, what it does, and the incredible opportunities and possibilities it offers. And… the little Welcome message from Matt was very warm and personal. It made me feel almost like I know him.

But under that paragraph was instruction for installation including five very complicated steps (to me). He called it: Installation: Famous 5-minute install. I read number 1: Unzip the package in an empty directory and upload everything. My first thought was WHAT PACKAGE? and WHERE DO I FIND AN EMPTY DIRECTORY? and HELP, PLEASE SOMEONE HELP ME!

Great Quick Summer Read

Just finished THE FAULT IN OUR STARS by John Green…started last night before bedtime and picked it up again this afternoon to read just one more chapter, then load the dishwasher. Well…the dishes are still in the sink. But I finished the book.

What an awesome coming-of-age story about teen life, love, living with cancer, laughing with language and books.

Young Hazel meets older Augustus in a support group. He’s not like anybody she’s ever known. Quite certain a hotty like him would never go for a wallflower like her, she answers a question he asks with a complex compound sentence filled with surprising and scintillating phrases typical of a much older more sophisticated woman, and he’s intrigued immediately. She’s not sure what to think. Can she take him seriously at all?

Not your normal sappy tear-jerking  love story, Green’s linguistic twists will have you laughing out loud as you bounce along his lilting pages. The book is not a comedy, however; there’s a definite element of wisdom in both the serious and the hilarious parts of this tale. Don’t miss it!

Howling.

This beautiful blog is so peaceful and alive with love and wonder. Read it and see.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Husband’s gramma is in the hospital a few towns away. Yesterday we went to visit her.

I don’t normally talk about things like this, but I think I should because there are people in our life that we just adore and maybe we don’t tell them as much as we should.

And there are things in this life that just hurt too bad and maybe we don’t just let them hurt like we should.

And there are times you just need to sit with somebody when they are probably going to be ok, I mean, you’re optomistic,  but nobody can make any promises and all you can say is, “Oh, good to see you. You are strong. We love you. Everything’s going to be alright.”

So that’s  what Husband and I did yesterday. We went to say “Hello, good to see you, we love you,” to Gramma L., a spunky…

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Learning to Blog/Write Professionally

Learning, learning, learning! Have you ever written something that will be read by many many people and gone back to read it one more time right after the final draft has gone out and found some glaring error that you can’t believe you’ve missed? If so, then like me you know it’s not fun! But with blogging, especially if you’re a relatively new blogger, it seems like maybe it’s not so critical as it would be if it happened in a hard copy publication. I may be wrong. I know the blogs I follow which are the ones I like the best of course, are those without glaring errors, at least not the kind of glaring error that makes you seem somewhat dimwitted.

I’ve done this a few times lately and it’s embarrassing, but I simply have to hope that since I’m a beginning blogger, readers will not be totally turned off by my blundering blurbs.

Guest Post: The Cutter on Happy Blogging

Dear Cutter…I loved your blog and I’m a quite old person compared to you. I loved it because there’s already way too much negativity in the world. We need more stuff to laugh at (or”stuff at which to laugh” for all you grammar purists). I’m forwarding your blog to my grandson…he’s also very smart and could use some happy, witty, wonderful writing in his life. I think you’ll make him laugh or at least smile. You certainly brightened my day. Keep up the great blogging!

Planting My Tree

I planted a tree the other night…I started about 8 pm and finished sometime after 1 am. I gathered all the tools I needed, got a hose hooked up to the water, and started to dig the hole. Now according to my standards, it was a pretty big tree, about 9 or 10 feet tall with a root ball diameter the size of a very large pizza. The directions for planting said to dig a hole about twice as big as the pot and the pot was twice as big as the root ball. That’s a big hole!

It was a definite challenge. Digging is very difficult for me without putting my “back outta wack”, especially if I have to lift anything from the ground, like big clumps of grass, lots of big clumps of grass, each one holding onto a big heavy clump of soil.

With the help of four breaks-going back up onto the patio, sitting down with my feet up, catching my breath, and about a half gallon of iced tea, I did it. I piled all the grass clumps and all the loose dirt from the hole onto a huge plastic garbage bag laid out beside the hole so I could move it easily after I was finished. HAH!!! Did I ever fool myself… After I put the tree in the hole, filled it in with a mix of dirt and potting soil, tamped it all down and made a little trench around it, I grabbed the edges of the large black plastic bag to drag that big dirt pile away so it wouldn’t get wet and muddy when I watered the tree. That’s when I realized the pile weighed at least ten tons (well… not really, but it may as well have). I could not budge it.

I surveyed the situation and remembered the next morning was garbage day. Bad back or not, I needed to get rid of all that grass and dirt. So I grabbed my shovel and proceeded to scoop it into a large garbage can on wheels that I’d laid on its side next to the dirt pile. I figured if I could get at least part of it into the container then maybe I could drag the rest. I did manage to get about half of it into that can, and with humongous effort lifted it to an upright position. Then, grunting all the way I sort of wheeled and dragged it to the curb out front for pickup the next morning. It was HEAVY!

I still couldn’t lift or drag the other half of the dirt pile, so I rolled the huge City garbage can around back, laid it on its side, and began shoveling the remainder of that dirt pile. I did it the same way I’d done the smaller one, scooping, tugging, and grunting just as before as well. Finally got all the rest of the pile into the big container. Lifting it back to an upright position was considerably more challenging than the smaller one, but once I accomplished that, it wheeled easily out front.

By the time I got all finished and watered my new tree, I was totally spent. My legs were shaky, my back ached as did my arms, knees, ankles, and even my fingers and it was all I could do to clean up and flop into bed. I slept like a baby!

The new tree is a Crataegus Crusader, a type of Hawthorne. In the spring it will be covered with tiny white flowers. Its leaves are rich dark green and shiny. They look a lot like Ivy. Many of the branches hold little clusters of tiny marble shaped berries whose color is light gray-green kind of like Granny Smith Apple’s. When I woke up this morning, it was smiling at me.

Independence Day & The National Debt

I couldn’t help thinking, while watching the incredible Fireworks on the Hudson presented by Macy’s in NYC, how much money it all cost. Don’t get me wrong…I love the July 4 celebrations and especially the fireworks. But when we have children living on the street and thousands of people living at or below the poverty level in this great country, doesn’t it seem like we might be better serving our American brothers and sisters who could use that money for food and clothing and a decent place to live if our celebrations were done by giving rather than presenting?

Pat of my thinking….to be continued…

Just Another Day in Paradise

I’d like to write a bit about my day and the joy that comes from accomplishing little tasks, from working on something until success and completion are in your grasp. I know it’s said that the only way to fail is to give up, that if you try…even if you fail to succeed at your intended goal, you haven’t really failed at all, unless you give itup. Another way some people look at this principle is that we fail forward to success. I recently read  that the success of Edison and his lightbulb invention was realized only after he tried over 3,000 filaments. One could say that Thomas Edison “failed” over 3,000 times, but he never gave up. Eventually he became famous all over the world. He was known as The Wizard of Menlo Park, and obtained 1,093 patents in his life. He is still revered worldwide because of all he did to create and facilitate our modern way of living, and is universally thought to be the most influential man of our millennium. It was Edison who said, “Opportunities are missed by most people because they are are dressed in overalls and look like work.” And possibly even more famous are his words, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Accordingly, a  ‘genius’ is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework.”

So I had a couple little Edison moments today. First, and this probably seems silly to most people, but I cleaned my toaster! A simple task by most standards, but for me it was a major accomplishment. I did an excellent job which took me nearly 45 minutes. But my toaster is now sparkling again almost like brand new.I felt so good about that when I was finished.

Then, and this is not silly, on my own with a bit of  encouragement from my own self talk, I fixed four sprinkler heads that were not working! Adrian, my oldest son, has spent hours here working on my sprinkler system and teaching me the basics like how to clean the little filter that gets clogged with mud and grit. He’d be the first to tell you that my fixing four sprinkler heads is huge. Each year I get a tiny bit more competent at taking care of myself and this house and my lot of weeds and potential. Anyway, fixing those four sprinkler heads, all of which were merely clogged…fixing them without having to call my son for help was a huge ego booster. I’m still feeling the euphoric effects of that little succession of successes. It’s an incredibly motivating thing and super spirit boosting…kinda like self-therapy.

It was a great day for me…even if it did get up to 106°!!! Success begets success and success comes from trying and not quitting, from stubbornly refusing to quit until that success is yours!