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.

My favourite cute news feeds

I love lots of these things

http://stuff.icanhascheezburger.com - general cute stuff
http://noms.icanhascheezburger.com - cute food

http://failblog.org/ Fail blog

most painful spam ever

 "blow up your penis now & see results in as little as 7 weeks Guaranteed"

Hmm, shouldn't that be blow up your penis now and feel the results instantly?

If penis enhancement drugs worked as advertised, men should need a third 'leg' along the front. :)

Cyclone Yasi

Was very big and quite nasty. But the eye didn't pass over town, and at the last I heard, no fatalities due to the storm. Lot's of damage. Power is out over a great deal of north Queensland at the moment. I have an iPad which I charged up just before the power failed. So I can stay in contact for awhile at least. But the main computer must wait for power to be restored over town. Our house had minor damage from the storm. Ross wants to check the roof. But it must mostly be ok or there would be more water around.

I am scared

There is a major cyclone building up off the coast of Queensland.
They anticipate it will be *very* large and *very* dangerous.

And the predictions have the eye going right over my city.

http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ65002.shtml

I can talk the talk

but fail at walk the walk.

I know that blogging is one of those things you mainly have to do for love. But I've gotten so accustomed to having comments on blog posts in my story blogs that I'm really nearly ready to abandon the lot of them.

After I cry about the whole thing that is. Sad, I know.

Definitely no fun

Living in north Queensland, we regularly have alerts about cyclones.

Currently there is one for Cyclone Anthony, still a fairly long way away but predicted to hit the coast almost directly over town.

Another good Mimi and Eunice comic

 I'm also really fond of several of the offerings from http://icanhascheezburger.com/

This includes LOLCats, LOLDogs, Very Demotivational, and failblog. They add up to at least one smile a day.

Cartoon for the day

Mimi and Eunice - definitely worth a read

Cute thing going around Facebook lately

The instructions

1 - Go to wikipedia and hit random. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band. 2 - Go to quotationspage.com and hit random. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. 3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”. Third picture no matter what it is, will be your album cover. 4 - Use photoshop or similar (picnik.com is a free online photo editor) to put it all together. 5 - Post it with this text and tag the friends you want to join in.

Mine was
Band name - Secret Rendezvous
Title of the album - Marry your equal

And my first album would look like

That worked well.

Compelling reading

A friend told me about PostSecret years ago now. The secrets are sometimes sad, sometimes scary, sometimes too much information. Some are very simple postcards, others are elaborate pieces of art.

Telling those secrets must be heartbreaking sometimes and incredibly freeing at others. You may laugh, you may cry but you are likely to read every card from start to end.

Now that ticks me off

Spam is the bane of email existence and I am pretty good at just ignoring it. But the latest spam is particularly disgusting. Someone is using the Animal Protection Society logo and info to get you to donate - to their pockets and NOT the ASPCA.

It bothers me because someone very naive soul may actually attempt to make a donation to a worthy cause. Mind you, you do have to be naive, the link is to some site that doesn't contain aspca or any near equivalent in the link.

Don't be naive about links and do donate to worthy causes.

Visiting Rome

Visiting Rome really was amazing. So much history everywhere.

I would not want to drive around the city. The traffic is insane. Lot's of vehicles, moving quite fast and the drivers there must know the width of their vehicle to a couple of millemetres. Fortunately, you can walk or take public transport to all the important sites.

We also did one of the all-day on and off buses. Those are good for getting a feel for a place and not walking your feet off.

Our holiday

I've been posting the pics of our 2010 holiday over at flickr.com. The most surreal part was the day we visited Vatican City, the pope was holding the wed audience out in St Peter's Square.

So I have pictures of the pope.

And the reason we were in Vatican city? We wanted to visit the Sistine Chapel. As it turns out, you don't go through St. Peter's at all, you go down a road for a bit and eventually end up at an entrance to the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel. The number of tour groups that day was large, I'd hate to be there in peak season.

They have got to be kidding

The place I work for has a new program "Swipe to Give". Costs nothing to join, present a card at a participating shop and some money from your purchase goes to the University.

Problems?

A) How much money
B) What does the University intend on doing with it?

Especially point B - why should I make more money available to the University when you aren't given the smallest clue what it's intended for. It's likely to all be swallowed by admin costs anyway.

A new version of bait and switch

After seeing the ads for Uncle Toby's rolled oats, two questions come to mind

1) is it bait and switch when someone advertises that they produce oats like only this company can and so forth. When you find the product on the shelf, it's surrounded by other oat products by the same company - pre-flavoured and no heart foundation tick of approval. With all the various oat products, it can be hard to find the genuine plain rolled oats.

2) Does anyone fall for their line about how they produce real oats. Honestly, there are several companies that sell rolled oats. You take oat grains and crush them which makes cooking easier.

Cooking: physics vs chemistry vs alchemy

Cooking physics - simple - apply heat to item to make it hotter.

Cooking chemistry - combine ingredients x y and z.  Mix in a certain way to create a batter that is different then the sum of parts.

Cooking alchemy - when ingredients combine to something vastly more than you'd expect from the simple list of ingredients.

I indulged in alchemy tonight.  I made basic bread dressing to go with a turkey breast I was cooking.  The ingredient list is really simple - onion, celery, bread (cheap white bread will do fine), a bit of seasoning and either chicken stock (which I never have on hand) or chicken bouillon cube and water and an egg.  That's it.  Somehow, they combine to make a side dish that I always love.