Writing tip

I'd heard before that writing daily is good for your writing skills in general.

And I must say that it does seem to be working for me. Writing every day keeps the words flow much more easily. Whether it is part of a publish or just working on background stuff doesn't matter. Just write. Write often. Keep writing. etc. :)

I am evil

Just in case you haven't realised this yet.

What brought this on?

A recent Sustainability plan. There is something about this document that really really makes me want to print 50 totally useless documents, leave lights on, and celebrate driving my car back and forth to work as the sole occupant.

My favourite recommendation though is something along the lines of "Inform staff of the inconvenience and expense of air travel." Say what? Like anyone who has flown in the past decade hasn't noticed this on their own? Air travel is horrible. You tell me to reconsider if it's necessary and I may reply about shoving something where the sun don't shine.

The 30 day drawing challenge

Since I haven't drawn anything - even doodles for years now, I suck big time. Therefore these should be funny. :)

The challenge

Second anniversary

Of my mom's death. Still miss you. I should have called/skyped more often.

How about that, twitter can be useful

I'm not following that many, and they are kind of a random set. One of them is Tex Perkins - singer/songwriter  (or some facsimile thereof) who tweeted that there was a new album coming - order from JB hifi and get an autographed copy.

And I now have an autographed copy of said album. :)

Breaking bad sleep cycles

Unfortunately, not entirely breaking it but...

I tend to wake up at least once per night and was finding it hard to go back to sleep. Problem one - my dad did this for years and mentioned it most days. Which leads one to the fear that it's something you inherited. Problem two - brain switches on to hyperdrive and there are too many thoughts.

So the solution? Well, much like using a basic meditation technique. Take deep slow breaths and concentrate only on the breathing. That helps keep brain out of overdrive (or push it down out of that mode) and sleep comes within 5 to 10 minutes by my estimate. Tis good.

I can understand this

The world failed to change! Indeed.

Wow, that's very cool

I was just cruising through blogger options when I came across http://nicarra.blogspot.com/view/sidebar Some of the views can be very interesting http://wowindianasam.blogspot.com/view/timeslide Others won't work so well with the blogging that I do - snapshots - not recommended. Still, that's a very interesting feature.

Pointless policy

Apparently there is a policy that any incident involving a member of the workplace must be reported to the security office. If the incident is offcampus - the security office hasn't a clue of what to do, it's well out of their authority. But you still have to officially inform them, even when there is nothing that they can do. Bonus tip for Health and Safety officers - there are no policies or procedures that will stop people from being idiots. Just won't happen.

Hubby had good news

Yesterday, Ross went to his specialist surgeon for a one year check on his hip surgery. The surgeon was extremely pleased with the results and said the next check could wait for 5 years.

Chicken and dumplings

Someone recently mentioned this dish and it made me crave it a lot. Cheap to make too, I used chicken frames, onions, garlic and carrot to make the base stock. Added some frozen peas, beans and corn. The dumplings are flour, baking powder, salt, milk and a touch of oil. Should be relatively low cal, it's certainly very tasty.

The most useless stats

I decided randomly to use feedburner for the blogs. Random cause I have no idea if that good or bad, just sounded like a consistent service people can use. So that's what you get if you use the Subscribe by Email box on the blogs. Feedburner has 'subscriber' stats. Most useless things I've ever seen. Period. It might vaguely relate to how times the feeds are checked for new stuff. But it's not actual subscribers because I refuse to believe that real subscribers go from 30 to 3 to 32 in the space of 3 days.

You call that a Staff Function?

My place of work is having a staff function. For $65 per person, you can go hang out with other staff people. They offer a live band for entertainment and finger food. There is a cash bar. Someone is hoping to make one hell of a profit here. Or for $65, you could go to a nice restaurant in town, have a good dinner and some wine or beer. It's a no brainer which appeals more to me. Give me a nice restaurant and proper dinner, not finger food and lots of people I don't know and won't want to talk to.

Worst game dialogues - LOL

The dialogues here are bad. The guy doing the faces is hilarious!

Grrrr

Blogger is currently semi-busted. I had to switch to old editor mode to make a post. And stop using blogger in draft, that is failing even more.

Sigh, I hate it when my tools go bust.

The tribute to Elizabeth Sladen --- Sarah Jane Smith

Video in two parts The first part The second part. Be warned, this may cause sniffles or worse.

More Mimi and Eunice

I adore Mimi and Eunice.

April has been a good month for stats

Warning - this is very boring.

I finally had a really decent month for hits across the various story blogs. For the first time ever, one topped 1000 for the month, more like 1200 and still climbing. Several others are well over 500. All of the ones I actually update are being looked at far more often this month then previously.

Will it continue? I hope so but there is no way to tell. If it stays up for a couple of months, I'll be such a happy happy camper. In the meantime, I'm pleased that a few more people finally discovered them.

I've never really cared if this blog is read or not, this is the random blog. Two of the other blogs are short story types and I expect the stats to drop when there is no story running. But the other three, well, it's nice to see they are gathering an audience. And the two short story ones have also had an extremely good month.

Spam email - I doubt he read that blog...

I ran across your blog (insert one of the story telling blogs here) and thought that it might be a good match for us.

We pay bloggers to write blog postings on their blogs and link those blog postings to our clients' websites. This improves our clients' rankings in the search engines, so they are willing to pay for your services.

If you had actually read the contents of the blog in question, you might ask the question of yourself, how exactly would a paid for blog posting fit here? Perhaps we should be discussing banners or text ads instead?

But no, clearly they did not read the blog in question. Because it would be painfully obvious that any paid for blog posting is going to stand out for what it is. A sell out.

Sorry, you can't offer enough money for that. No way.

How to steal like an artist

Another interesting article from the files of LifeHacker - How to steal like an artist

Some very interesting things.

29 ideas for staying creative

http://paulzii.tumblr.com/post/3360025995

An interesting post with some good ideas.

Next week == good

Starting Friday - public holidays on Friday, Monday and Tuesday. I've set up to take Friday of next week off so it's a 2 day week. And the next Monday is a public holiday so that is a 4 day week.

Maybe I'll have a chance to get caught up on the million and one things I mean to do...or maybe I'll procrastinate again. We'll see

This is me all over.

From http://mimiandeunice.com/2011/04/18/narcissist/

dropbox app

Well, I finally got with the program and started using my Dropbox - a way to upload files and share between multiple devices.

It is nice, I must admit. I started a little story text file on the iPad and uploaded it. Now I've edited it on the iMac and resaved. And it all worked fast and smooth.

Improvement on the dog situation

The one dog who was throwing up and not eating seems to be much better now. She rushes to the kitchen if you vaguely look like you might do something with food and she's nearly her old obnoxious self when getting ready for a walk.

The other dog needs his ears cleaned, which is a pain in the bum but nothing fatal.

It's a worry

We have two dogs, and they are 13 and 12 years old. For their size, that's a fairly old.

One of them has been throwing up and some nights this week refusing food. Dogs refusing food more than a day is a worry.

The other has been having problems with his ears but he's been prone to that for years.

Gotta love it

Originally found at So much pun

Can't stop the rain

I live in a place where we've had pretty dry years for quite some time.

This wet season has been seriously wet. At least some rain most days, several parks around have been lakes for a few weeks now.

And I've had enough.  Enough I say. Rain Rain, go away already.

Not that hard DAMNIT

Spell my name right! Especially if you are sending an email asking for a favor or information. It's only 4 freaking letters, how can you manage to miss it?

Easy steps to freaking yourself out

1. Go to local rainforest township to clear some plant debris from property
2. Develop a small itchy bite mark a day after step one
3. Remember that rainforests can have paralysis ticks
1. a paralysis tick nearly killed one of our dogs
2. tick bites itch like crazy
4. Now worry about is that bite a paralysis tick and did any travel home with us? Will one of the dogs get a tick?

Yasi did a lot of damage to trees to the Paluma property. And the house? One screen got damaged, a lamp shade fell to bits but that might have been ready to happen anyway.