I forgot to cross-post #BEDA contribution number seven. The post is over at my writing blog.
Case of the Missing BEDA- Solved!
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Tag Archives: BEDA2009
Tuning the ‘Tude
This marks the sixth day straight that I’ve blogged. I think that is a record for me. If not, tomorrow will definitely be a record. Wahoo!
This week is one of those weeks in which I can’t afford to have a bad week. I’m in the shakiest point in my monthly cycle (which has been noticeably far more mild than usual, thankfully, but I’m still more emotional than usual), I’m disappointed that my weight isn’t going down in spite of exercise and more mindful eating habits (although this could be combo of cheating last weekend in St. Louis and water retention this week), and I’m feeling incredibly uncreative at the moment (writing has been a disaster lately, I mean look how many parenthetical asides are in this sentence alone!). So, seeing as I have an interview for the job I’ve been waiting for administrators to create in my department since being hired on here almost three years ago, I have decided: I am going to have a good week.
This does not mean that everything will go perfectly. In fact, I’m sure something won’t. However, I can control how I react to unforeseen circumstances. For instance, it is snowing outside folks. April. Snow. I need the sun on my face in order to wake up and feel happy! But hey, it’s not going to happen, so I did my Tweet-whining and now I’m moving on. Besides, everything is so GREEN. Snow is a slow moisture delivery system. Nature is just priming the earth instead of flooding it. And having a good laugh at our expense. Well played, Nature. Well played.
Years working the crazy rush shifts in the pizza biz have taught me, among other things, to be adaptable and cool under pressure. I can SO do this. I’m going to do a little more planning for the week than usual. More balanced meals and fewer sugars will help regulate my moods, so I plan to NOT sabotage my body and instead load up on brain foods. Mom reminded me to pamper myself a little this week. Those who know me know I don’t do this enough, with all of the scrimping Russ and I do, so I’m going to get a haircut. I’ll give myself a mani/pedi. I may even find a new suit in which to interview (I have a back-up but I really ought to have another suit in my wardrobe anyway). Naturally, I’ll wear the power shoes.
Other things I can do make this a good week (month/year/lifetime):
- Do not beat myself up. Just. Don’t.
- Make someone else feel good. I’ve been careful lately about setting aside more time for Spouse-creature, for instance, cooking his favorite dinner Saturday night. And crazy thing- he actually reciprocates when I do nice things for him. Behold! The power of karma. Beyond that, I think tons of nice things about people, whom I may or may not know, all of the time but rarely voice these thoughts. I need to open my mouth more often, especially if nice things are bound to come spilling out.
- Clutter makes me feel less centered. I don’t have time this week but ideally, things would be cleaned and straightened up or, at least more than they are now. I’m NOT going to stress about cleaning the entire apartment, since that’s hardly a realistic goal. However, at the very least, I like having the kitchen and bathroom in order, so I will keep up with that usual routine as well as clean out some clutter from the kitchen. I almost knocked over mugs this morning and realized they’ve been sitting there for over a year untouched. Decluttering always makes me feel better. Into a Goodwill box they go!
- Budgeting time. I need a schedule. I am flexible and I’m good at adapting as needed but if I don’t have plans to begin with I will waste my time. While this won’t be a problem during the week (in fact, I’ll need to worry more about finding time to relax), I have this Saturday off. If I don’t want to completely waste it, I’ll need a plan. A simple, prioritized list. Written down. To. Do.
- Finally, the Fun and the Interesting make life worth living. And it is EVERYWHERE. If I’m not seeing the Fun and the Interesting, then the problem is in me, not in the world out there.
Attitude.
‘Banshee’ Update
For today’s BEDA, I posted over at the Babbling Banshee Blog. I gave a brief update on yesterday’s filming of The Babbling Banshee, an indie film produced by Starrynight Productions, the Spouse Creature’s film and theatre company.
See the April 5th BEDA post here.
The Descent
BEDA sounded like a GREAT idea until I remembered: The Weekend. I don’t typically make time for blogging on the weekend unless something really exciting happens. Fortunately, I went on a very pleasant hike today, so I actually have something to talk about. And, since the spouse-creature passed out around 5:30 only to be woken briefly for meatloaf dinner before succumbing once again to somnambulism [he was up for 30 hours due to a night shoot for Banshee], I have an evening free. (Tim: I know. Sigh. I know.)
Morgan-Monroe State Forest is home to numerous hiking trails, picnic areas and campgrounds. My parents and I ventured out there last summer and discovered the Scout Ridge Nature Preserve and Trail. This trail starts at the Scout Campground shelter and then winds down into a ravine. This area has very stark hills and valleys (argh, I know I’m using the wrong terminology here, sorry Nancy), in a way that only glaciers could be responsible for. See this pdf for more info on the area.
This particular path crosses the stream at least five times. There are a few proper bridges to cross and few ‘maybe this flat-ish rock/wet leaves/slick clay won’t dump me into the water if I leap onto it to get to the other side’ crossings. This is my favorite part of the trail. Climbing down into the ravine is like crawling into the cracks of the earth’s skin. The water runs crystal clear. The smell near the water is clean. The descent is centering. Naturally, I HAD to share this experience.
Tim and I planned to hike this trail for our weekend walk a few weeks ago. He said he enjoyed it, which is a relief considering how much I talked it up. We sat on the last bridge before continuing on the loop that would take us back to the shelter. I could have lie there for a good part of the day, listening to the water and soaking up the sun. Alas, there was Life to be lived, so we crossed the bridge and started the hike out of the ravine to the shelter. The end of this trail isn’t nearly as exciting for me as the beginning and middle. There is a place where the trail seems to go off in one direction, when in fact, it goes on straight ahead (remember this, Mom? Dad?). This trail is subtle. It’s not cleared, so you have to watch for the flattened leaves and places where a chainsaw hacked fallen trees apart to clear the trail.
The trail is .5 miles and is listed as moderate. It seems longer than a half-mile because of the time we took to get down into the ravine and out again. Plus, Tim and I stopped along the way to take many pictures (we both had our Canon Powershots). I only uploaded one picture from this trip onto Flickr. I’ll try to get more up later this week (and pics from Saint Louis).
Brave New Worlds
In my mind, the interwebs is an alternate universe. As an optimist, I prefer thinking of the World Wide Web as some sort of Utopian experiment. You’re laughing. Oh no, I won’t deny that porn makes up about half of the content on the web (I suppose this content IS someone’s idea of Utopia); however, there are some amazing institutions doing great work out there on the webs. One in particular attracted my attention yesterday.
The World Digital Library launches on April 21, 2009. This is an unprecedented partnership of national, international and academic libraries (see here for a complete list). The WDL’s mission:
The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.
What I appreciate most about this endeavor is the stress is on international primary materials. The videos on the site and this demonstration (pdf) indicated that the WDL platform itself will be available in numerous languages (in peeking at the source code, I saw hidden lines which indicate that users will be able to select either English, Spanish or French; hopefully, more non-Western European languages will be available later). The platform boasts the ability to provide translations of primary documents that are archived in the Digital Library. There are also indications that the platform will read the document for you, indicating that the platform designers are keeping accessibility in mind. Of course, none of this is clear until the site is officially launched. I look forward to playing in digital library land soon.
And now, for something completely different.
Today’s Musical Interlude: Alan and Sean of Great Big Sea join the lads and lass of Gaelic Storm to perform “Leaving of Liverpool” and “Hills of Connemara.” Wow, wish I could have seen this pairing!
For more Great Big Gaelic Storm, see the “Tell Me Ma” video here.
Time Wasters
I spend a lot of time staying connected via email, feeds, Twitter, etc. but that time spent pales in comparison to the shocking amount of time I spend per day online playing with various tools and web goodies. Here are a few that wasted my time today. Ah, well technically, I wasted my time. The goodies were just THERE, all shiny, waiting to be played with…
Blog Widgets
Generally, I try to be selective about which widgets I put on my blog because I don’t want my sidebar to be miles long. However, I love my book-related widgets (LibraryThing and DailyLit). I was going through my starred items in Google Reader this morning and was reminded of a recent LibraryThing post announcing updated widget creators.”Oh, boy!” Jenny says, pointing her browser to the appropriate link. And then I wasted time- lots of time- customizing a new widget for my blog.
I’m still not completely happy with my results (my own fault probably) but I’m curious if the newer widgets will load faster than the older ones as promised. It *seems* like my blog is loading faster (but honestly, there are so many other factors that could potentially affect load time, that it’s not fair to blame it on just one widget!). The CSS customization is a huge improvement, as is the mega-cool lightbox feature (click on one of the book covers to see what I mean). Curiously, they coded the author links to open in the same browser window, instead of in the lightbox, which to me is quirky but ultimately forgivable.
I opted for one of the lighter versions that stay static. There are, however pretty flash versions that rotate book covers, for those who wish to add some bling to their blogs. I also like that my own reviews can now display in the widgets. This is almost incentive to start writing reviews in LibraryThing. I haven’t reviewed there yet but I do make an effort to rate each book (which appears in the widget). Incidentally, I discovered today that I can rate 1/2 stars by clicking again on the star. This may have been a feature that’s been around for awhile but I found this by accident. The discovery is liberating and annoying- now I have to reevaluate my previously rated books. Ah well.
I have begun interacting on Facebook almost exclusively via my iTouch app because when I visit Facebook on a computer, I end up taking quizzes and getting distracted by all of the random shinies that live there. This is great if I need to kill some time but lately, I haven’t had time to kill. And really, isn’t my time better spent doing something else? I still prefer Twitter over Facebook. On Twitter, I can still chat with or message people, follow specific topics with the use of hashtags, and share links, photos and videos on a simple platform without all of the other dren.
Whines the acolyte, “But EVERYONE is on Facebook!”
“Hah!” scoffs the skeptic, “That’s what Facebook and its hordes would have you… oh. Nearly everyone IS on Facebook.”
It wasn’t until I saw more friends that I speak to on a normal basis and a few family members that I finally decided to join. Even though not everyone I’d like to see has an account, I see the utility of a large social network. I get it, really. But if I must go to where the hordes are and put up with a horrible user interface (I joined after the redesign), then I will do so using what I’m referring to ‘Facebook Lite’ on Pan (i.e., iTouch). I even found a way to bypass having to visit Facebook on a regular basis by having Twitter cross post to my Facebook status. This last tactic proved awkward though, as @, #, and RT don’t mean anything to people who don’t use Twitter.
Lovely Charts
I received an email newsletter from Lovely Charts informing me of various updates they’ve made. Nothing seemed earth-shatteringly new. There are a few nice things for Premium users but even with the new features, Lovely Charts is still not a service I feel strongly enough about to pay for. The free account allows you to create and save one project, which you can come back and edit later. I suppose you can get by on the free account if, like me, you don’t have an ongoing project and you can delete your completed chart in order to create another. It is easy to use and I don’t know any other tool like it that is free.
BEDA Note
A cautionary note? Already?? Yes, friends, it’s true.
Realizing that I should provide easy access to my BEDA posts, I will beginning tagging all relevant posts ‘BEDA2009.’ Then I realized that my current WordPress Theme doesn’t display tags and categories on posts. Boo! So, please use the BEDA2009 tag link to find all things BEDA. Savy?
BEDA 01: A Beginning of Sorts
Today marks the beginning of BEDA, Blog Every Day April, spearheaded by YA author Maureen Johnson (#BEDA for those following along on Twitter). I’m join in, seeing as I’ve been terrible about blogging consistently. Can’t promise where my post will appear (I’m primary author on two blogs and an admin on three others), but I will try to pump out one post each day on one of these blogs. The easiest way to follow along is by following me on Twitter, where I’ll post links to my #BEDA posts. If you don’t want to join Twitter, you can follow my account using RSS (see my posts here and here for more info on RSS).
Here. We. Go.
Regency Era Zombie Hordes
Elizabeth lifted her skirt, disregarding modesty, and delivered a swift kick to the creature’s head.
The previously blogged about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is due out… nowish. I’ve seen different release dates but Amazon is reporting that they’ll have more in-stock on April 6th. Here is a sampling of the first three chapters of the novel.
I like what I’ve read from the preview. I may need to keep a copy of Austen’s work handy while I read this. I’m curious to see how much Grahame-Smith embellishes (or not, as one reviewer complained) Austen’s original. It’d be nice if he tweaked the language in between the Zombie. Mayhen. Scenes. Hey, if you’re going to frell with a classic you might as well DO it.
I read a rumor that the publisher, Quirk Books, is considering similar adaptations of public domain works. I’m now considering other classic mash-ups I’d like to see. I’m also seriously considering trying my hand at one as a writing exercise. Oh the possibilities… A short story would be a reasonable length. I’m afraid I’d never find time to finish a novel length adaptation. Hmm…