Pointless balcony planter photo of the day:

It's a very overedited cosmos, because I decided I liked it that way when I was playing with it. Something about what happened with the leaves, I guess.

I can be weird like that, if you haven't already noticed.

And if you haven't already guessed, I don't really have any blather today. It's partly because I'm still waiting to get a full night's sleep (a little better last night, but sheesh. Enough is enough, ok?), partly because I've been doing work things at work (oddly enough), and partly because I just didn't think of anything to post.

Hey, I do get points for honesty, right?

I suppose I could explain the working at work thing. Normally, since this is August, I wouldn't even be at work today. Over the summer months I switch to having Mondays and Tuesdays for my weekend so I can be here on Saturdays and Sundays for programming. However, you might notice that the end of this week isn't August anymore. That means I need to get back to being here on the weekdays so that I can be around for school programming as it comes up.

So... um... there you have it. I never said that it was going to be an exciting explanation, so I hope no one was expecting one.





Believe it or not, that's all I've got at the moment. Heck, I haven't even got a doodle for this week's Illustration Friday done yet, so I suppose my two fans should be happy that any words appeared here at all.

If you're into that sort of thing, that is. If you'd rather just go back to staring at the overedited picture, well... have at 'er, I guess. As for me, I'm going to stop typing this riiight... now.

Chapter 1413: Wherein Dee makes two very obvious observations

1. I am really getting tired of not sleeping.

2. HALLELUJAH IS NOT AN APPROPRIATE SONG FOR A FUNERAL. I don't care if Jack Layton chose the thing himself. When a song has been called, by one of its interpreters, a "hallelujah to the orgasm," it Should. Not. Be. Played. At. A Funeral. Ever.

And besides, Steven Page did a pretty channel-changingly-poor job of it. Or at least I think so. But then, I'm not exactly a fan.

Um, yeah. That's all I've got today. I need to get some work done before my plant walk.

Well, then

I seem to have left my nerdstick at home, so no pointless photo today.

I hope I left my nerdstick at home, because otherwise the world now has my nerdstick.

I'm pretty sure I left my nerdstick at home, because you'd think it would be hard for a person to miss an entire lanyard being ripped off of her neck, and since the nerdstick lives on the lanyard...

Now I'm going to worry about my nerdstick for a while, ok?




Ok.

No worries, by the way. Even if I've lost the thing, there wasn't much of importance on it. Just bugs me that I don't remember not putting it on, that's all. Stupid automatic morning habits that aren't so automatic anyway.

Lack of post of the day:

Yeah, I can already tell that I'm not into it today. I apparently slept crooked and have the headache to prove it. I've also spent the morning looking at Illustration Friday entries and listening to 70s rock (70s today, yes. I know I'm more usually 60s, but I guess I felt like going with my own childhood today instead of someone else's), and the usual no-thought-for-the-blog has happened as a result. On top of that, I'm getting kind of annoyed with whatever Google glitch is making the blogs load either really slowly or incompletely these past few days. I think it must be a Google thing, because my iGoogle page is wonky as well. If you're having a problem seeing this blog because of loading problems, it seems like stopping it and then reloading helps. I need to change my already slow-loading template anyway, so maybe this will be the kick in the butt to get me to do something about it in the next week or two.

So, there we are. Not exactly blogging mood. I do, however, have a spider for you (as you can see in today's pointless photo). This is big news, because with all the wet (and all the mosquitoes in the non-wet) this year it's been awful for someone who makes a hobby out of trying to hunt down spiders with an autofocus camera. They're all hiding, you see. I had a bit of luck yesterday, though, and found this beauty as I was shooting rose hips.

With the camera, of course.

It's pretty much my first spider of the summer, isn't it? Sad, that. Hopefully we'll have enough of an autumn that I can get a few pictures then.

To go back to being annoyed, unfortunately I have very little idea of what kind of spider it is. It stayed on the side view and refused to give me a better look than what you see here. For a compulsive cataloguer like me that's a hard thing to deal with. Finally, a spider... BUT I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS.




And that last part needed to be in caps not only because I was annoyed at the spider, but because since I typed the part before it I've had to reboot the computer because of a program stall. This day is just out to annoy me, isn't it?

Ah well. I suppose I'd better post this thing before something else happens to annoy me even further. It ought to be a reeeeeally good drive back to my place after lunch...

Chapter 1410: Wherein Dee wastes an entire morning

Well, maybe not an entire morning. I have been doing the laundry. Or at least I've been loading the machine so that it can do the laundry.

Hmmm. This is already on it's way to getting silly, so before that happens I'd like to put on my serious face and say that I was sorry to hear that Jack Layton died this morning. Whether or not you agreed with the man's politics, you just had to admire his drive, his spirit, his passion, and his accomplishments.

----------

Ok, back to silly. Or back to nothing, more likely, since I've spent most of the non-laundry portion of the morning looking at random things on the internet and it's meant that I haven't bother to come up with anything for the blog. Heck, I haven't even opened up my drawing stuff (which is currently sitting all accusatory-looking on top of the scanner), so I don't have anything for the other blog either. Sad, that. I'd been doing not too badly lately at being blathery. Sometimes even with a topic, you'll notice.

Streak broken, I guess. As I've said before, sometimes when I haven't got much I can come up with something just by typing for a bit, but I can already feel that it's not going to happen today. So... um... Oh, I know:

This is my current favourite thing on the internet. Don't worry -- I'll get over it soon. For now, though, it makes me laugh.

Maybe I should look for something else that makes me laugh, since I haven't done a pointless sketch comedy link for a while. Ok, give me a bit...

You know, I was about to link to some Wayne and Shuster, but I'm almost afraid to watch them. I grew up loving their stuff; what if it doesn't wear well and I'm disappointed? Ah well, in for a penny. I should explain for those unfamiliar with Canadian parliament that "desk thumping" is the traditional way to show approval for something rather than applause. Oh, and if you know that this sketch came out back when they were first considering putting cameras in the House of Commons it makes more sense, especially since the first part of the sketch is cut off in the video. The concept was about how to make people actually watch something as boring as Question Period. Incidentally, the main reason I'm posting this particular sketch is that the chorus has stuck in my head since I was a kid. No, really. To this day I'll sing it in my head when politicians are saying the usual stupid stuff in the Commons.

I should end with something a little less specifically Canadian, I suppose. All right, back to the vault one more time, and then I need to go find some lunch. Ok. This'll do. Apparently I'm in the mood for Canadian comedy earworms today. Think of it this way, I suppose: at least I managed to get almost a post out of this nonsense.

Later, all.

Pointless salamander photo of the day:

This really should have been put with Friday's post, but I didn't realise I'd be blathering about the salamanders as much as I did. I did, though, so just for your edification and enlightenment (or if you were maybe interested at all?) here's a quick shot of the workplace salamanders. From the bottom to the top, that's Boris, Natasha, and Fluffy Spirit. And if they look like they're on some kind of secret salamander mission in the photo, that's only because I threw some crickets in there a little before I took the picture. Eating crickets is about the only kind of mission that Tiger Salamanders have. Well, that and burrowing.

Have I ever told you how much I hate crickets? Oh, I'm sure I have, and I'm sure you can find multiple iterations of what I'm about to say if you use the blog's search box. For now, then, the short version. I hate crickets. I was insect-phobic as a child (that'd make me an entomophobe, for those of my two fans who are into latinate labels), and while I grew out of -- or convinced myself out of -- much of that, crickets and I have no love lost. They stink, they're stupid, and when we first started using crickets for feeding (a few years back, when we had a couple of elderly toads. But that's another story) I could barely bring myself to touch them.

Not a big deal now, since I do it at least once a week, but I still don't particularly like crickets.

For those who are into the herptile thing at all, we use four-week crickets for feeding even though the salamanders could easily handle five-week and five-week would probably save us money, all things considered. There's one very simple reason for that: four-week crickets don't tend to sing, but five-week ones definitely do. Add chirping to the list of things I don't like about crickets, is what I'm saying. Oh sure, you might think it's pleasant to hear a single cricket going at it on a hot summer evening, but when you're buying crickets by the fifties or hundreds and they're in an office, the sound is NOT SOOTHING.

I... hate crickets.

But I'm ok with the salamanders, even if they're not much brighter than the crickets.

I guess I'd better be ok with salamanders, since our last garter snake kicked off this week and it'll probably be a while until we get ourselves another one.






My workplace is a bit different from yours, I'd bet...

Pet names

Further to yesterday's post: today? Watermelon! Yay melon.

Anyway. Before I start the blather I should say that in a vain attempt to make the usual pointless photo slightly less pointless, I'm posting an old shot from the DSi because I didn't have any more recent pictures of the pets on hand. DSi photography. Now there's quality in action, folks.

And now, pet names. It hasn't exactly recently come to my attention that I'm a little bit different with pet names. I've had a hand in naming a fair number of pets over the years, and while I can't say that the names I choose are terribly original or unusual, that fact that I tend not to use those names after the pet's already been given them probably is.

I have pet names for my pets' names, you see.

Take the cat ball above. That's Penny. I came up with the name Penny even though she was technically my parents' cat, because as we were trying to figure out a name for the new kitten it occurred to me that her eyes were very copper-coloured. Thus, Penny. Her eyes greened up a bit as she got older (so I guess now she's a slightly corroded Penny), but still. Penny's a perfectly fine name for a cat.

So I, of course, call her Lumpy now.

And why Lumpy? Well, it started when she was little and used to get weird swollen lumps on the inside of her lower lip. The vet said she might get them all her life -- she ended up growing out of them, though -- and the odd look it gave her face started me in the habit of calling her Lumpy. But why still Lumpy if she's not anymore? Oh, there are plenty of lumpy things about her to help the name stick. Anyone who's had a long-haired cat knows that you occasionally have to deal with litter box lumps, for example. Also, as the picture helpfully shows, she's pretty good at being a lump generally.

Yep. She's lump.

And, erm, sorry for the earworm if you followed that link.

Lumpy, naturally, isn't the only animal I've rechristened. Once you get in the habit you don't just get out of it. Max, who's often featured here for being the world's neediest cat, is often Smack. Sometimes he's much worse things, and sometimes he probably thinks that Max is his middle name because his first name must be Jesus...

Um. Yeah.

Dogs, by the way, are generally Dogbreath. It works for pretty much every dog, I figure.

Here at work the animals fare a little better from me, but only because I'm sharing the names with the public. Our recently departed garter snakes were Lost and Found, courtesy of Wheat's wife (I always kind of liked that), and since I get a kick out of the fact that few people younger than me would recognise our salamanders Boris and Natasha as a reference to Rocky and Bullwinkle (and yes, I was the one who named Boris and Natasha), I don't have nicknames for them. I did, however, laugh when one of our younger staffers tried to explain the names as "I dunno. It's from some cartoon or something."

We do have one other, younger salamander here, though. Since it didn't seem fair to have a Rocky without a Bullwinkle (or vice versa) I decided to abandon the theme and let our preschool kids name the new guy. Or girl.

They called it Spirit.

Um. Have I mentioned that I don't do well with cute or sweet pet names? That one's borderline for me. I'll use it around the general public, but for the rest of the time the salamander is Fluffy, as far as I'm concerned.


Oh, come on. How could you not name a salamander Fluffy?







Ok, maybe it's just me, then. But at least I didn't name him Lump, right?