Category: crankiness

Searching for Signs of Spring

Today is the official start of Spring in my part of the world, but you might not realize it by looking out the window. We had a bit of a winter storm yesterday, an icy-slushy-snowy mix that brought messy roads and cancelled schools. Today is bright and sunny, but I hear that more snow is on the way.

A couple of days ago, I saw the first spikes of crocuses poking out of the ground. I was too rushed to get a photo. Here is the stretch of ground where they were a couple of days ago:

No signs of crocus here. But I was happy that my lens managed to capture the rainbow sparkle of the icy snow in the sunlight. (Rainbow Sparkle sounds like a My Little Pony name. Crocus, on the other hand, sounds like a name for a toad.)


It wasn’t was I was looking for, but I will admit that the snow is pretty.


Iced mushrooms on a stump. (Sounds like the name for an unsuccessful recipe.)


Pretty it may be in clumps on pine needles, but “pretty” is not what I was thinking as I was chiseling through the 1-inch crust of frozen slush on my windshield.


The sunlight hitting the drooping rhododendron leaves made for a splash of color.


The most color was to be found in the wintery clothing of my children. (Here’s one splash of color sweeping the snowy footprints with a branch of pine. On my driveway. Yes, that sheet of snow and ice is my driveway. Good times.)


Here, one of my splashes of color cradles a lump of ice. (Additional color provided by the recycling bins. Pick-up delayed one day by the storm.)

So, there we are. Spring? Not so much sprung. I may have to resort to looking at photos of last year’s spring.

I don’t remember growing older

Today I registered Theo for kindergarten. Come fall, we’ll have two elementary school students in the house. I feel a bit sappy and nostalgic (my baby!), but I am also really looking forward to the easier schedule we’ll have when the bus comes to the house to collect both children. (The pick up and drop off at Theo’s preschool take about 45 minutes on either end, what with the 15 minute drive plus the time it takes to deliver or collect. It’s like I have a commute even on days when I work from home. I can’t seem to manage to get Theo to his preschool and be back before Phoebe’s bus, so I don’t get back home to start working until around 9:30. )

My post title is, in case you don’t recognize it, a reference to “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof, which has been running through my head much of the day. Of course, I feel like I’ve just grown older tonight, as in the course of choosing a photo to go with this post, I managed, with the help of a very annoying bug, to completely screw up the keyword tagging system I’ve been using in iPhoto the last few years. I’ve noticed that a bunch of my keywords were showing up on photos that I hadn’t tagged as such, and in the course of “fixing” some of these, I witnessed the bug in action. As I watched, I saw keywords getting applied to thousands of photos that shouldn’t have had them. So now those keywords are completely meaningless. Years worth of tagging rendered useless. So, you see, I can measure my aging by means of the technology that torments me. Why 10 years ago, I didn’t even have a digital camera of my own, let alone a digital photo library of many thousands of photos to mismanage.

In other (less cranky) news, the wave of nostalgia triggered by getting ready to send my baby out into the wild world led me to go poking into my blog archives from the time when Theo was a new arrival. In addition to finding the expected ramblings about having a new baby, I also found this other post, which (if I do say so myself) is quite entertaining:
Advanced Topics in Procrastination. If you are a procrastinator, you should definitely put it on your list of things to do later on.

Stewing

Tonight finds me cranky. There are a number of things contributing to my crankiness. A pinch of irritating interactions that struck a nerve, a dollop of research frustrations, and some generous quantities of life things have combined to make a recipe for a simmering stew of crankiness. I am the crockpot of crankiness.¹ I’ve spent much of the last few hours trying not to boil over.

We came home last night from my in-laws’, aiming to beat the Sunday end-of-holiday-weekend traffic. (We also had some projects we needed to take care of, including something Phoebe had to do for school for Monday). That all went well, but I was up too late, my sleep was further peppered by a nagging cough I’ve had for over a week.

Today, I spent a ridiculous number of hours trying to tame the gigantic pile of art supplies, craft kits, and kids’ art projects in various stages of completion that has taken over the breakfast nook² portion of our kitchen. This is not the first time I have spent hours trying to tackle this mess, a fact which is also seasoning today’s stew of crankiness. I actually took a break from this task to do some work. And now I have to get back to it. I will tame the beast, or go down trying.³


Here are some other odds and ends that surfaced on our visit to my in-laws’. Phoebe and I had a little sewing project, and we needed to dig out a needle. This image has nothing to do with anything that I just wrote about, but I was amused that this sewing tray contained both a tomato (in the form of a tomato-shaped pin cushion) and a basket, thus handily tying together two of my recent themes. (cf. basket, basket, tomato, tomato, tomato)

¹ The crankpot?
² Really, I don’t know what to call this area. It’s the part of the kitchen where we have our table, and where we eat meals, including, but not restricted to, breakfast.
³ Should I toss the beast into the stew?⁴
⁴ Wow, this is totally not the post I thought I was starting to write. In fact, I changed the title. And then even deleted my original first paragraph. I was going to write about various things I’ve said I’d do but haven’t yet done. Which is often a source of crankiness in itself. But I won’t go there tonight. Hopefully I will have simmered down by morning.⁵
⁵ Happily, few things cheer me up more than getting carried away with a metaphor.

ad it up

I’m not exactly fired up enough to do anything about it yet, but I am annoyed that WordPress has started adding ads to my blog. Among the sources of irritation is that I don’t know when, exactly, they started adding them. They show up at the bottom of some posts, but they are not visible to me when I am logged in to WordPress. I find this practice somewhat deceitful, as most of the time when I visit my own blog, I am indeed logged in. I think that’s probably the norm for bloggers.

What I see when I am logged in:

no ads

What I see when I am not logged in:

Ads.

I know that there has been fine print places saying that WordPress may put ads on blogs, but for a long time I just thought there weren’t any on mine. It was only a couple of months ago that I started seeing them, on my blog, and on other WordPress blogs that I visit. And now when I go to my “dashboard,” I have the option to buy an option to “upgrade to pro” for $99.00 a year. So if I want to get the ads off, I have to pay about a hundred dollars a year. That just doesn’t seem right to me.

I guess I can understand that WordPress is a business, and they need to make money somehow. I just feel a bit like I’ve been given free samples, and now that I’m a junkie, I have to pay. Plus I have no say over what ads they stick on my blog. So far, the ones I’ve seeen have been innocuous. But can I be assured that they will remain so?

I don’t like ads. One of the appeals to me of WordPress is that it was ad-free, and bloggers aren’t even supposed to add ads. But do I want to pay $99 a year? What are my other options?

So, do you see the ads? If so, when did you first notice them? Did you think it was me who’d put them there? Just curious.

And how do you feel about ads your own blog? Or on other blogs you visit?

Edited to add: I see now that there is an upgrade option just for removing the ads for $29.97 a year. But that still seems steep to me. And irritating.

a little crabby

The trouble with committing to doing something like writing a blog post every day is that you feel this irritating compulsion to write a blog post every day. Even when you are tired and crabby and should really get to bed. And then you find yourself trying to work up any of the dozen or so blog post ideas that you have recently had, but find yourself too tired to follow through. You find some drafts that are half-written, but you don’t have the energy to half-write the other half. So you putter through your photos again and again looking for something quick to post. But you just posted cute photos of your kids last night when you were tired, so you want to vary the subject matter a bit more. And then you have all this work to do, which you’d probably do better if you got a decent night’s sleep, which you didn’t last night, probably due largely to an unfortunate binge of Halloween candy. So you putter around on your laptop some more, not doing your work, and just getting more and more tired and crabby.

This is all purely hypothetical, of course. You know, the generic you. Not YOU you. And certainly not at all me. I am only imagining these things, and not in any way speaking from personal experience. I am cheerful and perky. Why, right this very moment I am totally not slumping into the dents of my couch cushions and scowling at my laptop, but dancing around the house making everything sparkle. With bluebirds singing and everything. I’m like the love child of Donna Reed and Mary Tyler Moore.

Oh, but I did remember these photos. I took these during my hike with YTSL during my trip to Hong Kong. See the cute little crabs?


These first two were in a stream that we crossed over.


I think this one looks like it’s wearing boxing gloves.


This third one was a land crab. (Land crab makes me think of Land Shark.)

capitalist dictators

As November approaches, I find myself hankering to join in on that mad month of collective daily blog posting known as NaBloPoMo. I’ve been crazy busy with work and life, but having now participated for 4 years running, I still want to give it a go. The NaBloPoMo headquarters have been relocated from their previous home at Ning to BlogHer. I went to the page where I needed to go to list my blog for the November blogroll, and stopped short.

I found myself very irritated, perhaps unreasonably so, by the instructions “Please enter your blog name, capitalizing the words as you would any title.” The trouble is, I do not capitalize my blog title. My blog title is collecting tokens, not Collecting Tokens. I don’t really mind when people capitalize it, when, say, mentioning me in a post, or listing me on a blogroll. But I do mind being told that I should capitalize it when I list it somewhere.

Putting the title in lower case was a deliberate stylistic choice I made when I started my blog nearly 5 years ago. I can’t exactly say why, but given my Propensity for using Capitalization in a Tongue-in-Cheek way to signal Pomposity and Officiousness (c.f. The Ministry of Silly Blogs, which is decidedly Capitalized), I suspect that I wasn’t feeling all that Serious. This blog, my main blog, is an informal place for me to unload my thoughts, memories, creative outbursts, and so on. The lower case perhaps reflects the lower bar; this site is a work in progress. (For that matter, I also decided on the blogging name of alejna, which, while it bears a striking similarity to my legal first name, is not the same. The stylistic difference is meaningful to me.)

So, I was about to sign up for NaBloPoMo, but I have hesitated. I mean, I hate to look like I can’t follow directions. I am predisposed to Following Directions when dealing with Bureaucracy. But to capitalize my blog name feels just Wrong™.

Here’s the thing: blogging is a new medium. (Well, it may seem old in today’s whirlwind of social media, but it hasn’t been around all that many years.) It is a form of self-publishing that has been revolutionary. Individuals have the power to put their written words out there to reach potentially large audiences without the constraints dictated by traditional printed media. Yes, this does lead to a wide range of writing and grammar skills sharing space on the web. Sure, there may be plenty of downright errors. Spelling errors, word misuse, typos, and all that jazz. Yes, some people could clearly benefit from an editor. But this medium also encourages stylistic liberties. We can choose to boldly split infinitives. Use sentence fragments. Or we can decide to begin sentences with conjunctions. And dammit, we can choose how to capitalize our own freakin’ blog titles.

Looking through my blogroll, I see that I am not alone in my capitalizing choices. Many bloggers have even chosen to further eschew capitalization norms, such as the writers of baggage carousel 4, crib chronicles, Wrekehavoc.com. These three women are well-educated (highly educated, even), intelligent, and fantastic writers. They certainly know how to capitalize according to the style guides. (And my guess is that there are contexts in which they choose to go along with the capitalization norms.) They choose to write without capitalizing their sentence-initial words or first person singular subject pronouns.

Dictating how bloggers should present their blog titles is stylistic prescriptivism that I don’t feel should be part of blogging. If you publish a scholarly journal, by all means tell people how to capitalize and punctuate their section headers. Tell them, if you feel so strongly about it, what font to use and when, exactly, to italicize. But if you are a blogging hub and listing the blogs of many across the diverse blogosphere, respect the stylistic fluidity of the medium. (And dudes, with a name like NaBloPoMo, making an issue out of archaic style guidelines just makes you look Silly™.)

What about you? How do you feel about capitalization? If you have a blog, do you, too, feel that your choice of capitalization is integral to the blog name?

p.s. Having gotten this rant out of my system, I went ahead and just filled out the form. But I used lower case. Because I am a Rebel like that.

n00b in the b00nies

Do you ever feel you’ve landed inside the plot of a novel? In the book in my head, I’ve always been the feisty heroine in an adventure tale, overcoming hardship with ingenuity, wit and grace. Lately, I have felt more the bumbling anti-hero. And I think this may be a tragicomedy.

After the Great Yard Sale Fiasco of 2011, I decided to regroup. After several rounds of donations, I still had excess stuff.

I decided to try Craigslist again.

Mind you, I’m rather wary of Craigslist. I know that some people have used it successfully, but I have heard plenty of horror stories. Or at least general annoyance stories. But I decided that it was worth a shot.

In addition to a few for-sale items, I listed a free futon mattress. I got an email response pretty quickly:

i would like to pick up or if i remember u r really close if u could drop it off either way works for me i’m in [town] were r u located?

No, I couldn’t “drop it off,” as “really close” in fact meant 40 minutes away. And I was giving the thing away. For free.

tomarow would b fine is there a way we could meet half way its about a 40 min drive it would only b 20 if we met up ?

Hmmm…I’m giving something away to a total stranger, and you are asking me to drive 40 minutes (round trip) to give it to you? On the other hand, this would mean that I wouldn’t need to give said total stranger our address. I decided that since our grocery store was 10 minutes in that direction, and I had to go grocery shopping anyhow, I could meet him halfway.

He also wrote:

do u txt ? if yes txt me to set something up with me

Actually, I don’t really text. I have a relic of a cell phone, and I am slow and incompetent at it. However, I didn’t want to admit this. I sent him a txt.

No, really, it was a text. I am txt illiterate.

I painstakingly tapped out a few short lines using my numeric keypad. Several minutes later, after proof-reading and editing, I sent the text.

He responded within 30 seconds.

After several more similar back-and-forths, we agreed to meet at a school parking lot halfway between our towns.

I don’t want you to think that I was writing out full paragraphs or anything. I didn’t even include any parentheticals or subordinate clauses. There were several instances where I let capitalization slide, and even once where I left out a comma. Because I’m hip like that.

I found myself rather amused, and even slightly charmed, by the exchange. Here was this kid, likely half my age, who was fluent in a written language that I could decipher, but was otherwise pretty alien to me. Meanwhile, he must have found my own writing to be very formal and old-fashioned. The equivalent of how I might feel about a hand-written letter from an elderly aunt. I imagined myself sitting at an antique secretary with a sheet of stationery, dipping my pen in the inkwell, using my most careful cursive:

Dear Sir,

As regards your previous inquiry, I would be amenable to arranging our rendezvous at a point that is located in between our two places of residence. I suggest that it would be most suitable to determine a location with adequate space that we might easily station our vehicles within close proximity to each other, perhaps a sizeable place of commerce or educational institution, that we may most advantageously complete our transaction.

I hope that you will forgive the brevity of this missive, but I am presently due to deliver a platter of petits fours for the fornightly meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Horticultural Society, and further I must hasten to catch the postman on his daily rounds.

Warmest regards,
Mrs. Bottomham-Pantsbury

Fast forward to this morning. John helped me shove the futon in the car. It was too big for the trunk, and we didn’t want to remove the carseats, so we lay it across the tops of the carseats. We had to have both back windows open.

At 9:56 a.m, I got another text:

Still good for today at 1130 right?

“Save for unforeseen obstacles, I shall be there as pre-arranged, fine sir.”

Ok ty c u latterZ

I got a phone call shortly before leaving, so I was running a bit late. I spent 5 minutes composing a text saying I was running 5 minutes late.

At 11:35 sharp, I found the school. The parking lot was conspicuously devoid of compact cars of the type mentioned by my text buddy. After a few minutes, I sent a text. At 11:47, the guy called to say he’d overslept. (Dude, you texted me at 10 am! Whatevs.) The guy was really apologetic and said he felt like crap for doing this to me. He said he could be there in 20 minutes. Not really enjoying the thought of another 20 minutes sitting in the hot sun in the abandoned school parking lot with a futon sticking out of my windows, I suggested I could drive out 10 minutes further and meet him midway. The trouble was, there looked to be exactly nothing between the two towns. No, that’s not true. There was a state forest. I couldn’t really see arranging to meet with a strange guy in the middle of the woods. (Well, I could see the headlines.) But I had the damn futon in the car, and I’d gone this far. I was either handing it off to him, or abandoning it in the school parking lot. I don’t litter, so I offered to drive the extra 10 minutes. Making the new driving total 80 minutes roundtrip.

It might not surprise you to learn that I arrived at the designated shopping center first. But the guy did show up. I helped him transfer the futon, and he even gave me $5.00 for gas. (If not for the $5.00, I would have felt totally scammed. As it is, I only feel partially scammed.)

So that’s how things are going with Project Get Rid of Stuff. Several hours of my time wasted and close to a couple of gallons of gas. To give the futon away. For free. To a complete stranger.

(Next up, do you want to hear about my adventures as an Amazon Marketplace seller?)

washout

Water is essential to life on earth. Living in the developed world, I am lucky to have easy access to clean water. I know that too many in the world don’t have this luxury. Water is necessary. Water is precious.

Water is also trying to kick my butt.

I have refrained from sharing here the soggy details of my recent battles with water, in its various forms. Sure, I started a post about waking up to a steam-filled basement and a geiser of scalding hot water shooting from our hot water tank, and thoroughly soaking through a stack of dozens of boxes of books and papers and mementos, but I figured I’d spare you the damp whining. And then there was the follow-up post (that I also didn’t share) about how that incident, what with the water running for X number of hours in the night, had killed of the pump to our well and another water tank to boot. After all that, the dozens of leaks that our kitchen faucet sprang, spraying a shower of water each time we had to wash dishes or fill the drinking water pitcher, seemed quite minor. Almost cute. I hadn’t even gotten around to griping about the water we’d had leaking in through the windows over the winter, due to ice dams on the roof, and all the trials of dealing with more snow than we’d seen in the past several winters combined. What fun was all of this? I decided to move on to other things.

But water was not done with me yet. You may recall that this weekend was the dreaded yard sale. I dedicated practically my whole week to purging cabinets and closets and piles of things. I signed on to the town’s group listing. I planned. I publicized.

Then come Saturday…it rained. A lot. It was a cold, wet, rainy, wet, dreary, wet day. There was lots of water. It was wet.

Did I mention that it was wet?

I ended up having the sale on our front porch, with lots of things still crammed in boxes. I didn’t even manage to bring out everything that I’d purged from the house. It didn’t really matter that much, as traffic was slow. Only the really hard core bargain hunters, and some people coming to haggle over the last bits of baby gear we had. People enthusiastically bought a few items that I could have thrown out, and quibbled over a dollar or two for things that were worth 20 times as much.

As low as my expectations were, I wasn’t counting on the rain. What’s more, I’d signed up to have Sunday be the rain date in the town listing, so that more-or-less meant having the sale both days. And today was rainy too. (But I just worked on packing and re-sorting things, anyhow. Only one person came the whole day, but at least he bought a few things.)

The weekend wasn’t a total loss, but I still have my work cut out for me. I have to make arrangements to donate, sell, or otherwise dispose of all this remaining stuff. I blame the rain.

And would you believe that tonight I discovered a new leak in my basement? I can’t tell yet whether it’s water coming in from the rain, or from the plumbing.

All of this has left me feeling very stressed and cranky. I need to unwind. I’d think that a hot bath might be a nice calming thing, but who knows what perils would await me. Would I shrivel into a giant prune? Slip climbing out? Get washed down the drain?

Now excuse me while I get something to drink. Usually, I mostly just drink water. At this point, however, I’m not sure I should risk that much contact with the plumbing. I’m pretty sure that beer is safer.

hitting a wall

I had meant to post something fun today, seeing as I’ve managed to go a whole 2 weeks since last posting. (That may be a record for me–I don’t remember going longer.) But I got some distressing news today. My nephew Diego had his 4-month-post-treatment scan yesterday, and the results were not as we’d anticipated. There will need to be more surgery. I feel a bit like we’ve hit a wall.

(I found this photo when looking through my photo library for clouds, since my sister picked that as a theme for her post. This felt fitting. I’m quite fond of the photo, though. It’s a mural in San Francisco, I think near the Bay Bridge.)