Stupefied
It’s been a thick, muggy, stupefying sort of day . . . which I have mostly spent arguing with Microsoft Picture Editor and cohorts and guess who’s winning. Things got sufficiently inflamed that I rang poor Computer Man and ranted for a while–although he seems to find me amusing, I can’t imagine why–and he’s going to come round tomorrow and see if any of the deeply bizarre things that keep happening (or not happening) are in fact either software or hardware as opposed to wetware, although I think bloodware* might be closer to the mark.
I did have rather a good time taking garden pictures though.** I could get used to that part of the new system. But this means that I now have a lot of photos to choose from . . . and one of the things I can’t manage to do is pull out a few and stick them up together at about half-size so I can make final choices. As a result you are about to get a lot of photos of Mme Gregoire Staechelin. You poor suffering things. Also, I went well beyond Rant Trigger Point the other day when I had the temerity to try and load TWO PHOTOS IN THE SAME POST. The second one just marches in and flomps down where it likes, no matter how nicely (and repeatedly) you ask it to sit over there, it’s squashing the petunias. Or in this case the text. I nearly burst into tears of joy and unhoped-for vindication however when Blogmom told me that this is not me (or anyway not only me), that the local photo elves are not friendly. So I’m writing this first, while my squire is sharpening my sword and my horse is being chased around the field because he thinks computers are a mug’s game and he wants no part of any of it. Clever horse.
I have no idea how this is going to go. If there’s no text for them to sit on, can I post more than two photos in the same entry? Or will they just sit on each other? Will something go horribly wrong with loading copied photos, because this computer doesn’t seem to have the right sort of little slot to put the camera’s memory doohickey in? But I assume that the blood, speaking of blood, will remain on this side of the computer screen. . . .
Note that I’m still on to find the old pictures of the Mme Gregoire at the old house, and when I find them I’ll post them, and you non-rose people out there can just go to bed early that evening.*** The young Mme Gregoire I have now is the standard type–if you go trolling for pics of her they’ll all look like mine–but the old one was particularly dramatically gifted with the long ruffly petals and the true peppermint stripes. Not to mention the wisteria she shared wall space with in great maribou-feather-boa swags. Sigh. However, my tiny new knee-high wisteria at Third House is growing away like anything. Another, um, seven years or so and it may even flower. . . .
Postscript: . . . breathing heavily . . . Don’t worry, it’s only a flesh wound. . . .
Well, WordPress did a little self editing by declaring that two of my photos exceeded its size limitations . . . one more thing to ask the Computer Man. When are all photos not created equal? And the answer is . . . yes, if you try to load a third photo, it sits on one of the first two. The sat-on one still appears in the thumbnails, waving its tiny hand, but it’s not there in the entry window . . . You know I chose to blog rather than tour. My horse is laughing. . . .
* * *
* Microsoft Word recognises ‘wetware’. It doesn’t recognise manticore, but recognises wetware. Not bloodware, though.
** This morning. When I should have been working. But the weather is like a foot on your neck. It’s not ideal photography weather either but hey. Nor is my digital camera my new best friend. I don’t like not being able to see in detail what the photo is going to be because I’m holding it out in front of me and the screen is, duh, very tiny. I also don’t like not being able to switch it onto ‘manual’ and force it to focus on what I want it to focus on. I was getting near Rant Trigger Point trying to get it to FOCUS on Louis XIV’s first flower of the season: Louis is dark red, and the camera just goes all Victorian heroine helpless and every damn shot comes out fuzzy.
*** Take a book, of course. Hands up people who look forward all day to going to bed and reading and when they finally get there have about ten minutes left, or in fact don’t even have that, they just refuse to turn the light out immediately however late it is. Feh.
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I’m looking forward to seeing your juvenile roses, having been introduced to a whole new world of gardening. I have long talked to plants, but they have either been trees or houseplants, so the world in between is a joy to be explored.
*** Hands up people who look forward all day to going to bed and reading and when they finally get there have about ten minutes left, or in fact don’t even have that, they just refuse to turn the light out immediately however late it is. Feh.
About forty five years too late for me to stop doing this now LOL Couldn’t find Deerskin* this morning as I refused to go to sleep without reading a few pages, but the eyes closed without permission… It was under the bed with a small but shaggy pile of critter hair. Oops!
* Finished Sunshine (again), and leGuin next (Always coming home and Four ways to forgiveness – rereading favourites, which will no doubt also find their way into subterranean fur-land)
It’s ALL subterranean fur land at this time of year! I can’t BELIEVE the amount of fuzz these boys produce! They’re deerhounds really, and the HAIR is getting through from whatever dimension the rest of the deerhound avatar is skulking in!!!!
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A magic world where genetic hair morphs into reality on leaving the dog’s body/mind/family memory. Deerhounds are incredibly polite And determined – their hair is obviously equally determined to exist, if not ON the dogs, then OFF them :)
LOL! That’s it! And sighthounds ARE VERY STUBBORN!!!!! :)
If you *wanted*, you could always try Flickr and post as many durn photos as you want. You just copy and paste the text it tells you to — no coding of your own — and WordPress won’t fuss at you about size limits. They’d even be one on top of each other, but you wouldn’t have the nice words on the side where the blank space is. *shrug*
ANYWAY, I am wishing so hard right now I was somewhere quiet like your garden. With walls that hopefully block out the Noisy Neighbors and their drumming and singing. (*Bad* drumming and singing.) I could close my window, but it’s a pretty day. It’s already *most* of the way closed…
And please, rose pictures. Even non-rose people can enjoy them! (Coincidently, I got a new batch of fiber (and a new spindle!) in the mail today. The woman who dyed it calls it Rose Garden. http://www.flickr.com/photos/69585952@N00/2514005448/in/set-72157605014689394/ It spins…well, it spins very nicely, so if you don’t hear from me for weeks, send someone to make sure the ferrets are fed. ;)
Oh, *so* gorgeous. Mmmm. But you be nice, or your ferrets will eat your *yarn.*
If it’s any comfort, my neighbours at Third House are a pain.
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I thought you’d appreciate it! The pink is very bright. :)
The ferrets like spindles. They stand up on their hide feet and teeter a bit, trying to catch the spindle in mid-spin. When I’m sitting and spinning (which is most of the time, since I’m not very good yet), they ooze onto my lap to get the spindle while I park it to draft a little more fiber in. I suspect they wouldn’t let me forget about them. :D
You’re trying to SPIN in the FERRETS’ ROOM? This is like gardening in the hellhounds’ courtyard . . . oops . . . :)
My neighbors choose inappropriate moments to have shouting matches in the parking lot, involving lots of cursing, and once threatening to call the police on one another. I’d choose noisy neighbors any day… mine scare me, slightly.
(And I live in suburban NJ, in a townhouse development!)
Third House’s neighbours had a really juicy argument yesterday while I was up there watering. First time that’s happened. It was interesting, but . . .
I do as much in the ferret room as I can! But I usually try to spin only when they’re asleep. It’s nice and quiet, and the ferrets *do* sleep a lot. But sometimes they wake up, and that spinny thing is soooo interesting.
Yeah, like gardening in the hellhounds’ courtyard. :D
Yes. I tend to tippytoe back into the courtyard when hellhounds have got bored with the nasty nobbly garden and gone back indoors to crash in their nice soft bed. And about the point I get all my tiny plants and bigger pots and bucket of mixed-up compost and so on all nicely spread out in the courtyard . . . they wake up. Foiled again. :)
Yet more proof the hellhounds and ferrets are related. *Closely* related.
And don’t forget FUR PRODUCTION. We need a way to spin THAT.
I know! I realized only *after* throwing away all of Austin’s blown fur that I should have saved it. I’m saving Kippy’s now. ;) No telling if it’ll turn out, but once I collect enough! I’ll let you know.
Kippy’s fur is pretty long. I’m not sure the ferrets’ would be long enough to really stick. I might try when they blow their summer coats this fall.
What about hellhound fur? Should be pretty spin-able if it’s a couple inches long.
(Most people say to mix your pets’ fur with wool to make it stronger. Seems logical, since all the wool I’ve worked with has pretty long fibers. Like, four or five inches in some cases. Pet fur by itself would have to have a lot of twist to stay together if it wasn’t very long, I think.)
No. Hopeless. Dwarf fur. :) I’ll have to stuff pillows.. . .
*raises hand*
Plus, if it’s a good book I can get sucked in… and then the next morning I rue the day I was ever born and then learned to read…
Lovely roses(: Are they very aromatic, too, or just super pretty?
And, please send warm night wishes my way, as I finally gave up and planted my silly tomatoes outside.
She smells divine too. You stand at the foot of her wall and it like pours over you. :)
Warm night wishes on their way!
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“Hands up people who look forward all day to going to bed and reading and when they finally get there have about ten minutes left, or in fact don’t even have that, they just refuse to turn the light out immediately however late it is. ”
Well all winter long, although when I go very late indeed i.e. four in the morning I try to keep out of temptation’s way. And in the summer I don’t read in bed at night and miss it horribly. There is a reason for this: I have a hard-and-fast rule no lights on in the bedroom from the time we sleep with the windows open, because of mosquitoes. I refuse to breathe in chemical fumes all the time in order to keep them down. I can’t sleep with mosquito netting because I feel like I’m suffocating. So my one easy line of defence is not having any lights on at all in the bedroom and this really, really helps. Please don’t say citronella candles, they do nothing. I have the kind of skin/blood etc that mosquitoes will follow and find through pretty much anything, so I have to take what measures I can. If there are 20 mosquitoes in a space (and watering the garden attracts them), and 40 people, all the mosquitoes will bite me. Bite me!
Yes, mosquitoes love me too. Cedar? You’ve tried cedar? And netting over the windows doesn’t work? You’ve tried everything . . . I don’t think I could bear not reading in bed for MONTHS. I think I’d probably just get bitten. Well, I’ve slept many nights with the sheet over my HEAD when I couldn’t find the beastly humming thing(s) to squish it.
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Me too! Both the reading AND the mosquitoes. The reading until all hours is not such a problem, not according to me anyway. Sleep? What?
[...though many a time my mother used to threaten to remove all lamps from my room-- after seeing me off to bed at some relatively reasonable hour, then discovering me still awake and reading at 2am... she never was terribly thrilled about that. My dad actually took all the books out of my room once, to punish me, when I was ten or eleven, I think. It took him a while. A long long long while. I have a lot of books. Not enough. But a good amount, to be sure. And I simply began taking them back, a few at a time, till he gave up and gave the rest back. Though, by that time, I probably had reclaimed most of them. ]
Anyway… but mosquitoes! ARGH! I too have spent many a night with sheets pulled up over my head, just to keep the bugs away. [I think part of that came from the scene in what I believe is Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great [the Judy Blume book, yes?], when she [Sheila] is sleeping and there is a spider on the ceiling and she pulls the covers up so it “won’t fall into her ear” or somehting like that.]
Yeah- when I was little, my parents used to tell me that the mosquitoes and everything else used to come after me in particular because I was so sweet. Well, it may have distracted or assuaged me back then, though I doubt it. But “you’re so sweet” does nothing at all to alleviate the annoyance of a body covered in bug bites, nor the ridiculous and slightly -seemingly- insane manner in which one cannot stop scratching!
And now, with West Nile and everything, it goes from annoyance to actual hazard. Ugh.
Hugs and chocolate for you both!
:)
–Julia
And now we can talk about TICKS. I can deal with them because I have to, but THEY FREAK ME OUT.
Cedar I think would work if I built a little room of cedar. I have the occasional night of mummy-wrapped horror with circling enemies, even with the no lights rule, but I can’t stand to cover my head. I try to make up for the no lights rule with morning reading in bed, but it is really not good enough.
No, dark, end-of-day reading is unique. I can’t stand having the sheet over my *face* but you make this little tent of pillows and . . . :) I actually find having the SOUND they make muffled is as important as keeping the little bloodsuckers off your skin. There’s cedar spray that you use to freshen the cedar eggs you hide in your woolies . . . ? Lemongrass? Neem oil? I know you’ve said you’ve already tried everything, but **not being able to read in bed . . . **
“Will something go horribly wrong with loading copied photos, because this computer doesn’t seem to have the right sort of little slot to put the camera’s memory doohickey in?”
Well, I really wasn’t sure whether to post this or not – given your overwhelming love for all things digital – but I suppose you can only shout at me… So, if you get what’s called a multi-card reader (this is a good example – http://tinyurl.com/575je6 – but there’s quite a few around), you can put any sort of small storage card from cameras, etc, into it and it will enable you to read data/pictures, etc, straight into your PC. Your computer man will know of them.
(draws head back into shell in case the sky is about to fall in)
Sigh. I’m totally demoralised by the threat of Photoshop. I’ll ask him.
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Err Am guilty as charged about the book thing…its why even though I go to bed before midnight my sleep patterns are screwed as I dont get to sleep until 2!