Turning 65

I am all ready to be 65. I've often wondered why, of all the birthdays that are considered "big ones", no one seems to complain about the 65th.

I think I understand now.

Never mind that the ferry system grants discounts when you are 65. Never mind that in the eyes of restaurants everywhere you are well-and-truly a "senior". The big thing is getting on Medicare.

You see, I'm in that sector of the populace that actually will see improved benefits and a vast reduction in expenses once Medicare kicks in. I pay a small fortune for terrible medical coverage: it doesn't pay anything until I'm broke and in the hospital. That's pretty bad compared to Medicare. There's too many things to detail here, but I now know why few Boomers really complain about the 65th.

I'm looking forward to it.

And it's not as if I could successfully pretend that I'm much younger...

Spring Snow

Spring and Snow

Today is the first full day of Spring. It also happens to be the first snow of the entire Winter. Somehow, this seems wrong.

What does Spring mean, what does Winter mean if it rains all Winter and snows in the Spring?

Predictions for the Pacific Northwest agree that this year will be wetter and cooler than the last few, in opposition (or balance) to the rest of the country seeing warmer and dryer weather.

No one said anything about snow.

Forced to go online

Well, another frustrating afternoon fighting software. Perhaps the thing to do is succumb to the tedium of posting from within a browser. I mean, really, is that so hard?
Especially given how seldom I post here.

So what's the difference? Nothing, except that I need to remember the password here. Using Ecto and the now-apparently-dead blogo, I only had to click on "post".

sigh.

Further whines about blog software

So it turns out that something deep within ecto is not happy with the way I type.

I hit a return in the RTF editor and it turns into both a paragraph and a line break.

That's just not right. If I have a pet phrase, it must be "That's just not right."

But it isn't.

Another Format Test, this time of Ecto

OK, here's how it is. I'm fighting Ecto's desire to add both the paragraph break and the basic break after each sentence.
I really don't like that.
Viewed in the HTML editor, they aren't there. But post them…

Whidbey artists

I scored some major enthusiasm today by visiting the Made Right on Whidbey show up in Coupeville, WA.

I went originally to see Linnane Armstrong and her woodcuts, but as I wandered about, I stumbled across Bev McQuary with some of her lampwork beads! I hadn't read closely enough to discover that she was going to be there.

To make this short, I came home with a boat-load of enthusiasm for getting back to art. Oh, sure, I took some pictures of the flames in the wood stove yesterday, as sources for doing custom flame paint jobs (haha, like I'll ever get back to doing that), and have been doing paper miniatures for wargaming, but really: these two are real artists with work to show and sell.

I managed to avoid descending into wood block prints (having done some before as well as serigraphs), but I find myself all fired up (no pun intended) to light the torch and make some beads.

Imagine! I want to make something!

Scanner's Dilemma

One of my sisters gave me our grandmother's doll book. The book was made in the early 1900s and each outfit was handmade from scraps of clothes my grandmother acquired from her sisters and aunts.

Each outfit has a long page of darling text, added some fifty years later.

The thing is, receiving this book reminded me that I hadn't finished the last photo album yet. I went to the computer to remind myself how far I'd gotten.

Not far enough. But I saw that I had not made adequate backup of what was there, so I set about burning DVDs to record it. That lead me to check on the other things, including the withering web site. Oh dear! I haven't changed it in ages. I better look into that.

I discovered that the older software I had used did not survive the upgrade to the Mountain Lion OS upgrade. While I was debating the merits of using TextWrangler to manually manage the site, I got an email from CircusPonies saying that for a limited time, I could buy macFlux, an almost-WYSIWYG editor.

I bought it. I ported the old site to the new program. Reading about the new macFlux, I got off onto HTML5/CSS3 and the benefits of same.

I got a book or two on HTML5. I went looking for some samples. That sent me off to build two new sub-sites as experiments. One of them is for Hope's grandfather, Rene Weaver. I did his (Rene Weaver) and that reminded me of the genealogy projects I have going.

I renewed my account at Ancestry.com, and searched a few days for some missing pieces of information. Reading about my ancestors in my research reminded me that I needed to update my resumé.

When I finished the updated resumé, put it on the web, I remembered I wanted to add some pages for the conlang (constructed language) I have finished. It's used by the imaginary space faring race I sometimes write about.

That got me off on the obscure language tangent. I recalled an interest in the Washington state names that sound strange to a Californian. It turns out most of them are from Chinook Trade Speech.

Well, you can buy books about Chinook, so off to Amazon I went and bought one.

Which reminded me that I have budget issues. So I downloaded the latest statements from the bank and loaded them into Moneywell. Which reminded me that I am behind in the budget data.

Fortunately, the cats jumped up on the counter and dug into the dirty dishes, so I dropped everything to shoo them away.

I think it's time for lunch.