Category: NaBloPoMo

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.

Home Alone

Home Alone 5¹
Synopsis: A 40-year-old mother of two is left behind when the kids’ father takes the family to the grandparents’ house for the weekend. Mayhem and hilarity ensue.

That’s right, I have the house to myself this weekend. John took the kids down to his parents’ last night, and I stayed home. (Except that I wasn’t home, I was at a conference hosted by my program in Boston. Minor details. I still came home. And was alone.) John’s brother is visiting my in-laws, and leaving tomorrow, so John wanted to get down there while he was still in town. I, however, had committed to being in Boston for the conference. The miraculous result is that I have a whole weekend free of parenting responsibilities.³

Can you guess what it is that I most fantasize about doing?

Not setting the alarm.

I didn’t get to do that this morning, my first morning home alone. I had to leave the house by 7:30 to get back to the conference, as I was scheduled to chair the morning session. But tomorrow… tomorrow, I have not committed to going in. In fact, I have committed to not going in. I have committed to sleeping in.

I realize that there is a strong possibility that my sleep binge fantasy will not be realized. I can envision any or all of the following happening:

  1. I will wake up early with a cough or cold
  2. I will wake up early with a headache or a stomachache
  3. I will wake up early with leprosy or rabies
  4. I will dream that the house is on fire and wake early in a panic
  5. The power will go out, causing the smoke detector to beep, which will make me wake early in a panic
  6. I will dream that I am back in high school and it’s finals day and I haven’t been to a class all semester and I don’t even know what room it’s in and wake early in a panic
  7. The kids will figure out how to use the phone and call me at 6:30 in the morning
  8. I will get a wrong number phone call from India at 5:30 in the morning
  9. Bumbling burglars will attempt to break in at 4:30 in the morning
  10. Aliens will come and abduct me at 3:30 in the morning

I can only hope that if it’s aliens, they put me in a quiet cell and let me sleep some more.

Beyond the goal of sleeping in, I also plan to work up some data, review some journal articles for a paper I need to write, read up on logistic regression and maybe mixed models, as well as clean out the refrigerator, bake some muffins and do some laundry. Hilarity and mayhem will ensue.

¹ Can you believe that there have been 4 Home Alone movies? I haven’t actually seen any of them.²
² Can you believe that Macauley Culkin is over 30 years old now? Holy crap.
³ I suppose I will have to parent again when they come home tomorrow evening. But I’ll have most of the day, right?

make one that goes up to 11

In just a week, it will be the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

What’s more, seeing as it is 2011, it will be 11/11/11. I plan to celebrate the day by making something that goes up to eleven. I haven’t decide yet what sort of thing I’ll make, but there’s a good chance it will be a list.¹

Won’t you join me? Post something that goes up to 11 for 11/11/11.²(You know you want to.) If you feel so inclined, set your post to be published at 11:11. And then we can have some elevenses.

11:11

Together, we can crank things up to 11.

¹ I’ve already done a list of 11 eleven things, so it won’t be that. Unless I wait till the eleventh hour.
² Edited to add: And if you don’t have a blog of your own and still want to play along, you can leave yours in the comments of my 11/11/11 post.

Image of the dials that go up to 11 is a screenshot from This is Spinal Tap.

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.)

obligatory Halloween photos

Here are my witch and frog.

The frog refused to wear the hood for most of the night.


Here, the witch completes the transformation of her brother into a frog.

We didn’t manage to carve pumpkins this year. However, we did manage to make some snowmen. Here’s hoping that this is not a new Halloween tradition.


Here was Saturday night’s pre-dinnertime snowman. My only contribution was to bring out a carrot.


This is one Phoebe made all by herself on Sunday. (Should I be concerned that she made a right-leaning snowman?)

We really lucked out with the storm, actually. You may have heard that much of the Northeast lost power, and many are still without even days later. There have been lots of trees down on powerlines in our town and neighboring towns. At least when we lost power back in August it was warm! So, again, we were lucky.


For us, it just looked like a lovely December snowstorm. With more leaves.

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.

NaBloPoMoFaSoLaTiDo

Okay, so I guess this will have to do for the post mortem of my efforts at posting daily for the month of November (i.e. my annual NaBloPoMoPoMo.).

While I’m not exactly sorry that I participated in NaBloPoMo again this year, I was a bit disappointed not to have written more posts that I had been wanting to write. I had hoped, for example, to get through some more photos and stories and such from our September Spain trip. I did manage one such post (Sevilla Tapas tour). But believe me, I have many more photos to share.

I did manage a few other posts that I was pleased with. In all, I guess I feel that there were 10 or 12 worthwhile posts from the month. (Now with over 60% filler!) But considering that lately I’ve barely managed that many posts in a month at all, at least the endeavor got me posting again. And while I didn’t manage to really write much in the way of substance, I did put together some posts that were a lot of fun (for me), and what’s more, I did come up with a few pretty kick-ass post titles (if I do say so myself).

Here are some of the highlights (at least for me) of the month:

I did also put up the The October Just Posts, which is always worthwhile, if not actually “fun.” (Which reminds me–it’s time to send in nominations!)

Plus, I participated in Neil’s Great Interview Experiment, which was a lot of fun. I got to interview Michèle of Voix de Michèle, a wonderfully entertaining blogger. (Here’s that post.) I also got to be interviewed by Becky of Welcome to My Life, for which Becky devised this brilliant post title:

I was really happy to meet both of these bloggers. And while I didn’t meet nearly as many bloggers through NaBloPoMo this year as I did the year I started the Ministry of Silly Blogs (check out the crazy-long list I put together last year), I did get to make one other new blog friend (submom of Absence of Alternatives) through the NaBloPoMo site.

One last thing: I totally took advantage of the WordPress post by email feature. I find it’s much faster to compose posts in my Mail application, especially with links and photos, than to do so in my browser. If I hadn’t been using this, I don’t think I could have managed to post as often as I did.

Also, I’m still behind in my blog reading from the month, especially for those other bloggers who participated in NaBloPoMo. So if you see me pop by with a comment on a 3-week-old post, that’s why.

Oh, and one more last thing: Here’s a photo of Phoebe riding a blue dinosaur. Just because.

the penultimate post

Oof. It’s 11:00 p.m., and I have yet to post anything. It would be kinda silly to make it this far into NaBloPoMo and blow it on the penultimate day.

I’m quite fond of the word penultimate. It’s one of those words that gets misused frequently, often in a way suggesting that the user thinks it means something like “more ultimate that ultimate.” But ultimate is just that: final, unique. The end all. Penultimate? It’s the second to last. It’s not quite the be-all and end-all of ultimate.

I suppose that’s much of the appeal. It’s the not-quite. Most of us never achieve the level of ultimate for most things. Who among us will get to be the ultimate authority on some subject? Will we ever achieve ultimate happiness? Ultimate calm? Bake the ultimate chocolate cake? I, for one, am not sure I’d want to. Because wouldn’t that mean I’d reached the end?

Penultimate is a word that gets used frequently in phonology. We talk a lot about the penultimate syllable of word. For example, in a given language it might be the penultimate syllable, or the penult (as many like to call it, skipping the formality of the polysyllabic phrase) that bears the word-level stress. Or you might talk about the antepenultimate syllable. Or even the preantepenultimate. It really amuses me that there is a word that means “4th from the end.” (Mind you, when talking “ultimate” syllables, phonologists tend to say “final.” It’s seems somewhat anticlimactic.)

As usual, there is a backlog of posts I’d like to write, but clearly I’m not going to manage anything of them now. (Have I mentioned that I am a very slow writer? I type, I delete, I re-type, I edit. And often I delete and re-type once more.) So rather than write about something that might take some thinking, I’m apparently going to just ramble on for a bit just for the sake of rambling. Because ultimately, that’s what’s blogging is often about.

—

Oh, and one last thing, since I like to have at least one picture in a post. Can anyone identify this?

breaking bread

Today is Thanksgiving in the US, a holiday marked primarily by having a large meal together with family and/or loved ones. In previous years, I’ve set the table with utensils, and served up some turkeys. This year, I want to make sure we include bread (and a few other bready baked goods) in our ongoing ThThTh feast.

  • break bread: an expression meaning “have a meal together with people”
  • “Breaking Bread,” a song by Johnny Cash
  • “bumped his head on a piece of bread”: a line from the song/nursery rhyme “It’s raining, it’s pouring” in the version I learned as a child (though not in more commonly known versions). Did anyone else learn this version?

    It’s raining, it’s pouring
    The old man in snoring.
    Bumped his head on a piece of bread,
    And didn’t get up till morning.

  • bread: a slang term for money
  • breadwinner: one who earns money for a household
  • dough: another term for “bread” as in “I’ll need some dough to buy bread”
  • dough: a mixture of flour, water and other ingredients used to bake bread, as in “I’ll knead some dough to bake bread.”
  • The Pillsbury Doughboy: an anthropomorphic wad of dough used to sell products for Pillsbury.
  • half a loaf is better than no bread or half a loaf is better than none: an expression meaning, roughly “getting something is better than getting nothing”
  • “Half a loaf is better than low bred:” a joke made by John Steed in The Avengers episode “The Correct Way to Kill”

  • The Little Red Hen: a fairy tale about a hard-working, wheat-growing, flour-grinding, bread-baking hen who gets no help from her lazy companions, who prefer to loaf.
  • “give us this day our daily bread:” a line from the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer recited by Christian church-goers
  • bread line: a queue to receive food from a charitable organization
  • whitebread: a slang adjective used to describe someone whose tastes are bland and culturally mainstream, or things associated with such a person. Such as white bread.
  • bun in the oven: an expression meaning “knocked up”
  • The Muffin Man: an English nursery rhyme. Do you know the muffin man?
  • muffin top: the lumps of flesh about the waist caused by wearing pants that are too tight
  • Hansel and Gretel: in this fairy tale, two children leave a trail of breadcrumbs to mark their path so that they won’t get lost in the woods. It’s not a particularly effective method.
  • bread is the staff of life: a saying about the importance of bread. Etymology online says:

    Staff of life “bread” is from the Biblical phrase “to break the staff of bread” (Lev. xxvi.26), transl. Heb. matteh lekhem.

    I’ll take a page from Magpie and redirect you to this blogger, who poked further into the orgins of the phrase.

  • “I’ll grind his bones to make my bread,” a line spoken by the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk:

    Fee-fi-fo-fum!
    I smell the blood of an Englishman.
    Be he ‘live, or be he dead,
    I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

  • the best thing since sliced bread: an expression said appreciatively of something really innovative, or just something really good. Often said facetiously.
  • bread and circus: as the wiki says, since I’m too tired/lazy to say something on my own “is a metaphor for handouts and petty amusements that politicians use to gain popular support, instead of gaining it through sound policy”
  • Project Bread, a Massachusetts anti-hunger organization. I’ll donate $5.00 to them for each commenter who includes the name of a type of bread in the comments below.

image credits: bread from wpclipart, Little Red Hen from Ella M. Beebe Picture Primer (New York: American Book Company, 1910) 87 from clipart ETC.