Pigeon Woes

The cats brought a pigeon in and I had to grab them, push them into Mum's room, open the door, and usher out the pigeon. It's looking a little shell-shocked. Sometimes they add to the burden of the day...

Just looking in to make sure my emergency blogspot is still here. The real one is here.

Small Announcement

This blogspot is returning to it's status of 'emergency blog'... all posts (old and new) will appear on my new Wordpress blog from now on.

The Piper Plays the Silence

Mum was worrying about what to get one of her friends. She bought a book token for her but gave it to someone else, so has been scratching her head. On TV, someone came on singing Mull of Kintyre.

"Oh - that's what I'll get!" said Mum. "That's good. She'll like that."

Yes, I liked it too - I've always loved Mull of Kintyre. I never got tired of it, though I know it was being played constantly, and some people got sick of it. Maybe I wasn't quite as exposed to it as others.

In any case... we were both enjoying it, tapping our toes to the tune, and the bagpipes started up. As you know, that raises the drama of the song considerably... but I couldn't hear them. I heard the singing alright; just not the pipes. I stopped tapping my toes - all the fun had gone out of it for me.

Is it that my hearing has got so bad? Or is the sound from this modern digital TV (for some reason) just not as full and rich as we got from our old mono TVs, or from our big old hi-fis? Perhaps it sounds OK to the normal ear but not to the deaf/hard of hearing?

If there was a piper in this very room, would I not be able to hear him? I bet I would - but in one way it would be overwhelming, and in another way I wouldn't be able to grasp it at all. It would be like swigging a long cool drink but getting it all over me instead of quenching my thirst.

I can't judge. People ask questions sometimes, but I don't know the answers. Maybe the sound is better on modern equipment and it's just that my hearing has gone downhill. I've always known it was bad and getting worse, and that high tones in particular are hard for me, but it doesn't stop that sinking feeling when you listen for something you know is there and can't make it out.

Later on, there was an ad for a piping band CD, Spirit of the Glen. I couldn't hear any of that either. I want a refund on these ears - they're not what I ordered. Perhaps I'll bin all my tapes this Christmas....

No, I wouldn't be so rash; I've already started to go through them with this purpose: if it makes sense to me and I enjoy it, I'll keep it. If it whooshes over my head like a whisper of wind, it's gone. No matter what it is. There was one old tape I was playing (a James Last party tape), and after a while I thought "I really don't recognize this... and yet it's one of the ones I played a lot." I went closer to the hi-fi and studied the song list, trying to work out which song it was, then fast-forwarded, only it didn't seem to move. And it sounded just the same when I put it on again, chugging along like a distant African chant... I took it downstairs and said to Mum "is there something wrong with this tape?"

She played it on her own hi-fi and then said "yes, it's bushed! It speeds up then slows down. Throw it out."

It's not good news that I had to check with someone else that it WAS bushed - this tape I knew so well.

I'm going into hibernation.

More Quibbles

I'm much happier on WordPress, seeing as things are going so badly where my blog originally was - unfortunately there are a few things that aren't so good.

(1) CSS
My main quibble in WordPress is not being able to edit the CSS (yes, I know they want to see the colour of my money!) I was able to edit it on Blogigo, so that's a step down for me.

(2) Bulleted points!
WordPress won't allow me to put a space between the bulleted section and the next paragraph - it runs them together, no matter what I do. For some reason I can't even view enough of the code to be able to fix it. I might find out further down the line that the bulleting glitch is a template problem rather than a general WordPress problem, but I'm not going to change the template till 2008 - so I won't know for sure till then.

(3) Room round an image
WordPress (or the restrictions of the template) will not allow me to dictate the amount of space around an image. The changes I make show up in the editor, but as soon as it's saved to the blog.... blip!!!... the text is back to crowding very tightly round the image.

(4) Quotations and indented text
'Blockquote' in the current template has a light grey background, with no obvious way of changing it. I recently ranted about the overuse of grey in Tempted by Stephen Fry...

(5) Spam
My main fear! Spam is already pawing my pretty blog with its nasty sticky tentacles. 'Askimet' (whatever that is) blitzed 5 spam messages in the first 5 days. Back home in Blogigo, that was my quota for a year or more.

Mutter snakes in paradise mutter worms in my apple mutter...

Me Chimera, You...?

You Are a Chimera

You are very outgoing and well connected to many people. Incredibly devoted to your family and friends, you find purpose in nurturing others. You are rarely alone, and you do best in the company of others. You are incredibly expressive, and people are sometimes overwhelmed by your strong emotions.

What Mythological Creature Are You?

Thundercloud in a Storm

Life can turn from dreamy to dramatic all in a moment. You're wandering along sleepily, thinking about what you'll do when you get home, and suddenly you have a situation on your hands.

I read someone (I can't remember who!) who quoted someone (still can't remember, gah) about how the world would be an awful lot better if people would just sit down and keep quiet. That's very true, though it's not only humans who should sit down and keep quiet.

There I was, pottering along in mid-afternoon with the neighbour's dog, Thundercloud - she's a Golden Labrador Retriever. As usual I had her on the leash.

A couple of dogs appeared on the path in front of us - a boxer and a black Labrador. I thought they would probably be annoying, getting in our way and trying to play, as many young dogs do when they're off the leash and trying to associate with Thundercloud.

But as we attempted to edge past, the boxer and the black lab began bellowing into Thundercloud's face. Two or three other dogs appeared and came in on both sides, baying, darting in and out. The two leaders stood fast. Thundercloud pulled forward on the leash and yammered right back at them.

The racket was terrible - it sounded like somebody being torn to pieces by a pack of hounds, and I couldn't believe it was us in the middle of it. We weren't doing anything to anybody. What was THIS all about? This is a small town in Scotland - this doesn't happen here.

They weren't biting yet but I had a feeling it wouldn't take much - I hung onto Thundercloud who was still surging forward, and shouted 'SIT!', all the time feeling that was just ludicrous, because I didn't want her to sit. Didn't seem like such a good idea. Possibly I hoped the other dogs would sit, but they weren't looking at me at all - all their attention was focused on Thundercloud.

I wanted to look up and see where the owners were, but my eyes were locked on the dogs on front of me. I was hanging on till someone came to our rescue - we were the centre of a barking, snarling, uproarious maelstrom, with everywhere else silent and populated with figures I couldn't even begin to guess at - you just hope they're somewhere out there and coming to deal with the situation. The very squirrels were probably holding their breaths, gazing down from their branches...

It had been too long - I was beginning to wonder where the heck the owners were - they should have been right on the heels of their dogs?

Time passed...

Then they were there, two or three figures, scruffing their dogs and sweeping them away. They looked every bit as horrified as I felt. I don't think they expected anything like that to happen. One of them patted Thundercloud in an apologetic, comforting way, which Thundercloud accepted tranquilly... just to show it wasn't her that started the racket.

On the way home, she didn't look as though anything out of the ordinary had happened... just trotted along and raked about in the leaves, and looked at me with puzzled brown eyes a couple of times. But when we were nearer home, she pulled hard, ears pricked - "come on, I want to get home now."

When I got home myself, my cat Sharky was curled up at the foot of the Christmas tree. He opened his eyes, blinked, and went back to sleep. All was peace.

Dark Dream

The night before last I dreamed that one of my favourite pet clients... ach, they're all my favourites in one way or another... wrote me a letter that she was very ill and hadn't much time left to live. She went away while she was still able and would like me to look after her cats for a few days.

In this dream I was upset at the news, and when I looked round her kitchen, I saw that she had departed quite hurriedly. Dishes were unwashed and vegetables were lying half-chopped and turning to sludge. I felt in my heart that if it were me who was ill, and returned to that mess feeling the way I did, it would be very depressing - "there's no one to clean up after me - no one cares."

For some reason there was a group of people lolling around in the living room, people I didn't know that well; an ex-boyfriend of mine was among them... though in this dream it seemed he was still my boyfriend. He was volunteering to go out for some food, saying he would do the cooking tonight. "what are you going to get - salmon?" I joked, and he looked hard at me, as though taking me seriously and thinking me rather demanding. After a short pause, he said, "maybe. Maybe." I was even more surprised, but I let it drop. I didn't want to discuss my client's affairs in front of Boyfriend's friends, so went with him out of the house. I said, "there's something else I want you to get..." and pulled out a notepad to write it down.

Boyfriend coughed and shuffled, and I looked up and realized two girls had detached themselves from the genial company and were going with him to the shops. I felt guilty at making them wait, so scored out a lengthy explanation I'd embarked on, and cut to the chase. "I'd like you to get a box of chocolates because..." I started to write, and the girls began fidgeting. The one nearest me muttered something obnoxious, and stared at me with pale resentful eyes.

I grabbed her by the collar and yanked her towards me. (Do people really DO that?? I did it in my dream). I roared into her face, "If you saw what I was writing and knew how upset I feel just now, you would think shame on yourself. All I'm asking from you is a little patience and understanding while I discuss something important with my boyfriend."

Everybody, including Boyfriend, looked stunned, and I knew not one of them had ever thought me capable of putting my foot down quite so firmly or loudly. I felt as though I had unlocked my lungs and let all the anger and misery out, and the girl I'd challenged turned round and hurried off up the road to wait as far away from me as she could get.

Dream ended... Mum woke me up.

We were early into town and it was still quite quiet, but we were hardly alone. There was a funeral party standing outside the church. A sleek black car moved off, carrying the bereaved family. A woman looked out from the back and our eyes locked.

Then the car was gone.

Looking In and Looking Back

I'm enjoying the switch to WordPress - the free version is more restricted than hosting one's own blog, but it's not as restricted as Blogigo. In turn, Blogigo was less restricted than some blog places I sounded out ages ago. It's not as if I went for the first place that popped up in my searches; I didn't know about feeds and so on, but I looked around a bit. One reason I fought shy of Blogger at the time was that I didn't like the default templates, and it always seemed so slow to use... I was on dial-up and had System 9 on the Mac. (Quoth she, on her Blogger blog). Another nice thing about Blogigo is that were no ads on the blogs, or nav bars like in Blogger.

Still, too much was wrong in Blogigo, and things were so slow in changing that they often seemed to back-pedal, and so... In making the switch to WordPress I feel as though I'm stretching my wings.

I don't think I can set the length of feeds in WordPress (free version) any more than I could in Blogigo, but to be honest, I would have opted to truncate them anyway. I wrote an impassioned post on the subject a couple of weeks ago but didn't have the nerve to publish it. Maybe later... it will need editing!

I hope most will consider the comment situation is better than it was on Blogigo - I would agree, because at last people can leave their blog URLs and I will know where they came from. Also I guess if they want to know what responses have come in, they can subscribe to the comments? Not sure on that point yet. Would have been too cutting edge for my old blog.

The old blog didn't allow Javascript - I couldn't see what keywords were bringing people or where on the planet they were surfing from because Statcounter couldn't be fully used. All it could tell me were the visitor numbers, and I believe that's something that's hard to measure correctly anyway. Statcounter stats never matched the stats on Blogigo itself.

I was told the choice of blog templates was small when you opted for the free WordPress, but it's a larger choice than we had in Blogigo. I recognized some of them - Blogigo used WordPress templates and Rubric was the first I ever used - the white design with the writing pen in the corner. I dropped it because it wasn't working fully on some old browser I had at the time... maybe now it's less of a problem, as the old browsers should be dropping by the wayside.

(In theory!! I was at the house of a friend of Mum's just a couple of months ago and was asked to search for something on the internet for her. I fired it up (on dial-up) and discovered her browser was Internet Explorer 3.1. We had quite a long conversation while waiting for the site to load).

Photographs - it seems I have 50MB free storage on Wordpress, but the situation on Blogigo was ludicrous - you could continue to add photos up to a 6262KB limit if you knew the workaround, but there was no way of viewing the photos you had in storage, which also meant they couldn't be deleted. Just now I went in to check the details, and so many error messages came up it crashed the Firefox browser.

I haven't tried out the photos on WordPress yet - presumably I'll be able to view, delete etc - and that will be such a relief.

I would also like to think if there are any major overhauls, we are either warned a little beforehand or will be able to view a short explanation later - I don't yet know how other blog hosts handle the issue of downtime... I've come from a blog backwater into an urban population.

EDIT: One thing I'm finding where the freebie WordPress is WORSE than Blogigo is that I can't customize my own CSS unless I pay. Both Blogger and Blogigo allow it - not sure why WordPress doesn't.

It's Finally Happening...

I'm moving from Blogigo. I will chat a little here while the move is in progress.

Christmas Tag

Perhaps I'm the only one who hasn't done this meme yet (found on Pete's blog), so here goes:

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? - Both. Gift bags and CD boxes really speed up the process - and can be reused within the family.

2. Real tree or artificial? - Artificial - I don't have to buy it all over again every year.

3. When do you put up the tree? - Normally much later than I intend (20th Dec onwards) but this year I got it up today! (13th Dec). Oh - yesterday now.

4. When do you take the tree down? - 6th January before midnight.

5. Do you like eggnog? - Never been offered one.

6. Favourite gift received as a child? - Silver Brumby books by Elyne Mitchell. I would definitely have said Bear, but I wasn't a child when given him!

7. Do you have a Nativity scene? - No.

8. Hardest person to buy for? - All of us... we've already got what we need, along with too much of what we don't need.

9. Easiest person to buy for? - Mum's best friend - she's always loudly appreciative of the things we give her. Possibly she hates them in private, but she would never allow you to think it.

10. Worst Christmas Gift you ever received? - A hand blender... it sounds spoilt! I already had a hand blender and had said I would like a juicer. I didn't realize how expensive those things were, but I think there are some fairly cheap models around now.

11. Mail or email Christmas cards? - Mixture.

12. Favourite Christmas Movie? - Bernard and the Genie. Unfortunately they 'deleted' it (whatever that implies) and we never saw it back on our screens. More recently, my favourite Christmas movie is The Grinch.

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas? - Mostly December, but I buy occasional gifts throughout the year when I spot them. Bought a teddy for my sister months ago, and now she says she doesn't want any stuffed animals because her mob of cats steal them or pee on them.

14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? - I was forced to recycle a box of chocolates someone gave me and my sister. I wanted to eat it but my sister wanted to give it to someone else - she said I could eat it if I paid her for her half of the box. It got recycled...

15. Favourite thing to eat/drink at Christmas? - Christmas dinner - the bread sauce in particular, but all of it really.

16. Clear lights or coloured on the tree? - Coloured. I used pastel fairy lights on my old tree, and the LEDs on my new tree make my eyes pop as they're such dramatic shades. I like them - but I also miss the pastel lights, which are real 'fairy lights' to me.

17. Favourite Christmas song? - Lonely This Christmas. Favourite Christmas carol: Once in Royal David's City. When much younger, I did a hatchet job on The First Nowell. It goes... "Today is the day... before the dayyyyy... before the dayyyyy of Christmas Eve." I found it was possible to change it each day as we got nearer to Christmas, and it generally fitted, even if you had to really draw it out. One little girl overtaken by the magic of Christmas... that kind of thing never quite fades, no matter who tries to stamp it out for whatever reasons they have.

18. Travel at Christmas or stay home? - Stay at home.

19. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeer? - No. The subject came up today - I think all the Santas have to learn them. Zzz.

20. Angel on the tree top or a Star? - At my house it was an angel bear in a dress with wings - quite a big cuddly one! This year she has a job somewhere else (one of Mum's clubs) and there's no room for her anyway... the top of my tree is about 5 mm away from Mum's ceiling.

21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or Christmas morning? - Christmas coffee time. :-).

Like Pete, I tag everyone who wants to do it.

Subscription Feed Poll

Do you use the subscription feed icons which are found on blog pages?

For instance, see the ones at the foot of my sidebar. Vote in the poll at the top of my sidebar - only two days left at the time of writing this.

Blogger Connection with Picasa

Mood: Hunted
Listening to: 'Flashback' by Imagination

Rose DesRochers of the World Outside My Window blog has posted the following piece: A good reason not to post your photos on Blogger, BloggerPlay and Picasa.

I'm glad Rose has posted on this matter, as I did not know about these caveats. I assume it includes headers and avatars on Blogger blogs, though I'm having a hard time imagining those on slideshows. Perhaps Blogger has a way of screening them out? The only pictures I've posted on Blogger so far are my header and avatar, which is why my thoughts went straight to them...

As I've been reading up about Facebook, Google etc, it seems to me that the internet is becoming harder to use, not easier. All these pitfalls and private agendas. Depressing.

What...? Oh, it's the Window Cleaner!

I respect window cleaners and am glad of the work they do. But I hate it when I'm sitting here at my computer and there's a strange thump, and you think "what's that?" and when you glance round, all that's there is a cat staring at something you can't see. (Nothing unusual about that). You go to see if anyone came in the door, and it's closed fast - but when you return to your desk, there's a guy at the (upstairs) window next to it, scraping foam off with a rubber blade.

It throws me every time.

I must learn to look for the window cleaners first, and chase up other possibilities second. Just because it's only waving trees, flapping birds and slinking squirrels outside that window, it doesn't mean the view doesn't occasionally get filled with a large human being.

If you came here via my profile, this is my emergency blogspot - my main blog is here.

Panic's Over

My main blog at Blogigo is back up and running - though it seems it was running all the time for some people, and it 'faded back in' for me, browser by brower. My sister can view it this morning too, and I doubt if she was clearing her cache and deleting her cookies. I was clearing mine but I suspect it was unnecessary. Anybody wanting a little more input into the 'redirect' problems in Firefox should have a look at my post on Blogigo, Puzzled Blogger.

Off to watch Wimoweh again... it really is tremendously relaxing. If you're having redirect problems yourself and that's how you got here, you might prefer to listen to it too.