Pecked to death by pigeons! Really?

It's not what happens in the book, it's what happens while they are reading the book. Vastly funny.

I hope there is an indoors for this event. Yuck. Splish, splash, yuck.

2003. Wow, that long ago? That was the Sapphire when my Barony ran out on me and I realized that the SCA does diddly squat for single females. It was the Sapphire when I learned that I could pitch my 8' X12' tent single handedly, in the rain while talking to my Baroness, who came out to keep me company. She couldn't help, she was holding someone else's toddler. She couldn't even go back and find me some help. But she could talk about the horrible day she had and how awful the drive down had been while watching me pitch that tent all by myself, in the rain, at night. She didn't even hold a freaking flashlight for me. She was holding that toddler. So much for a Baroness with a Pelican.

It was the Sapphire when I started playing with the big dogs (who left me out to dry when I was dealing with an even bigger dog) and I ruined my lavender pair of Timberland boots in the mud and rain while taking care of myself and helping those big dogs. I got some help from the big dogs in return that Sapphire.

I miss the Tims more than I miss the SCA.

No boots were ruined this weekend.
No baronies and/or Pelicans left me to fend for myself.
The big dogs don't remember that I exist.

Time marches on.

Good friend writes for a living. Actual published, best selling writer. No, it does NOT pay what you think it does. Good friend has laptop. HP Pavillion dv1000, that has screen issues. Plugging it into a different screen does not help. Probably video card. Her backups are in great shape. No fear of file loss, she even does off site storage.

Can anyone help? She's gotten an ACER as a short term substitute, but she'd really rather have her larger, more capable machine functioning again.

Thanks muchly.

Cake Wrecks. I can't stop laughing.

Hooray, hooray the first of May!
It's too damned cold outside today!

Orlaith!

Hope you have a very happy one!

I wanted to go to WV and check out the property, walk the perimeter and make sure not much was changed. Poor Bud didn't really want to drive out there, but we managed. I think it was the shortest trip I've ever made. We drove out, checked out the driveway, needed 4 tries to make it up the driveway (we were not in my 4WD truck) and then we started to walk the perimeter. We got 75% of the way around and I was feeling awfully foolish. I'd left my water in the truck. Bud had finished off his. So we trekked over to the driveway and walked the rest of the way on more or less easy surface so I could hydrate. But we posted the property where I hadn't been able to get to it and I know that nothing drastic happened over the winter. It's too early for things to be blooming up there yet. No flowers to photograph.

On the road out, we had almost gotten out of the community and Bud paused for some cross traffic. These were the last two stragglers of the herd. I'd hoped to see a few wild turkeys, but we were making far too much noise tromping through the woods and hammering nails to post the property.

What a finish!!!

Edwards is OK, but there were people in the stands that were injured by flying debris. I hate watching cars go into the air. Backwards, no problem, but not up.

We'll be at Richmond in the stands, safe from flying debris. It's a night race. I don't think I'll be able to get any photos. I've got a pretty slow long lens and we don't have good seats for pictures.

I long ago learned the difference between apology and atonement. Hayden needs to learn this. She has sent an apology for all of her bad behavior since October of last year. A set of badly spelled, unpunctuated, run-on sentences in an arbitrary paragraph is completely insufficient to the task. Oh dear, I must be irritated. My language gets very formal when I am irritated. It keeps me from swearing.

Every so often, I go through my computer and tidy up loose ends. I verify that my automatic updates have been running as they should, I do a manual configuration scan and run a deep scan that I know I wasn't on the road during and so forth and so on. I've been traveling and haven't done a back up on schedule. Though most of the files are on two drives, I'd like to get them onto a drive that stays home and a drive that travels, instead of two drives that travel. I also burn DVDs of the files I have purchased and downloaded for digital scrapbooking.

I hate creeping failure. Good maintenance precludes creeping failure. So I try to keep up on the maintenance. This also helps me stay organized. As I go through my computer for my back-up process, I sort through the directories and place them in a consistent order, that makes sense to me and I hope would make sense to a stranger.That's my test for organized files.

How do I know that my backup is sufficient? If I lost my hard drive today, I wouldn't panic. I might be upset, but I would not have hysterics over lost pictures and data. My pictures and data are safely backed up.

Bud and I were discussing last night how boring our lives are. He's got plans for the yard, I've got plans for the house, but all in all, our lives are outstandingly dull.

We like it that way.

We worked long and hard to have boring lives. A comfortable bed in a nice house, no outstanding debts to worry over, dinner on the table and clean clothing to wear. A spouse that loves us and that we love in return - what else do we need?  Fries? 

I had to spend far too much time watching the Disney Channel while I was helping out with Chrissy. I couldn't tell the shows apart. Now, I'm down in NC with Bud and Will who are 'chilling out' watching sitcoms and I can't tell these shows apart either. Honest, there isn't much difference in the shows. It's a little bit scary. Either they say dirty words, so you know it is an adult program, or they don't say dirty words and it is for kids, but the humor is still pretty much identical. The laugh track is loud, the acting is miserable, and the plots are all the same.

I really, really hate TV.

There are disadvantages to being built like a horsewoman, with 'healthy' thighs, and otherwise small. Only Western wear shops have jeans that fit. There are no decent Western wear shops on the East coast that I've been able to find. There were Sheplers stores in Phoenix. I made it to the one location that was still open. Drat, they were having a sale and the inventory was low. Only two pairs in my size. But that's still two pairs that I can't find at home.

I saw the cutest pair of Ariat boots... Discontinued Fatbabies in purple and black. Did I get them? No. I have more pairs of boots than I have shoes. Really. I've got riding boots, insulated riding, hiking, dressy cowboy, and casual cowboy. As much as I love to wear boots, I don't need another pair. But I was tempted. I've loved Fatbabies ever since I saw them.

The trick is to not have the watch too close to the IR port.  But it works and I don't have to do a lot of fussing to get it to work. Open the application, click a couple of buttons, put the watch down and wait.

But the manual is just awful. They have a lot of problems with English grammar, those Finnish to English translators.

I often think I could make a fortune correcting the grammar of manuals. For lack of a subject to pronoun correlation, you can get awfully confuzzled.

The rule is that a pronoun refers to the noun immediately preceding the pronoun. If you can't go backwards in your words from a pronoun to a noun and have it be the correct noun, you shouldn't put a pronoun in the sentence at that point and should instead, use a noun. Many people think the pronoun refers to the subject in the sentence. Not always.

"My father and grandfather both wore glasses. They were old." OK, were the glasses old or were father and grandfather old? Imagine a user manual written like this. Lots of information, but not clear.

I'd thought it was called USB IR and no, it's an IrDA USB. My technobabble was incorrect. But LifeTime fitness sells them at a discount and I'm happy with the price I paid for the thing. Now to upload my workouts and analyze them.

Five workouts in and I'm doing analysis? Not really. I just want to get used to playing with the data, so when I have enough information, I can analyze it.

One of the employees at the gym said that this was the most tech-happy gym she'd ever been to. I have to agree, the culture at the LifeTime that I go to is high tech. There are worse cultures that I could think of for a gym to have. That we are all running (or walking slowly) around with cardio monitors isn't a bad thing. For once in my life, being a techno geek puts me right into the 'in' crowd.

How popular is all the tech stuff I'm getting into? I got the last of the IrDA USB dooflanguses. (dooflangi?) The are going to have to order more, if they haven't already. There are more folks wearing watches like mine every week. Really. The testing equipment is in use almost every time I glance over that direction. Whoever thought it up as a money maker/additional service deserves a raise.

I want to get the USB device that allows IR transfer of data from this Polar watch system. I want to be able to upload my saved workouts to the application on my computer that will allow me to track/analyze them. I thought I'd check the local sporting goods stores, to see if they perhaps had the accessory. Silly me! I was speaking technobabble to teens trained in basic sportsgabble.

"I want the USB IR attachment for an RS400," drew blank looks. I rephrased, "I have a Polar RS 400 system. (shoot cuff, tap on watch)  I'd like the USB attachment that will allow me to upload my workouts to my computer via infra red transmission. (nonspecific upward hand waving followed by typing on air)" That got me a kid running around for a cable. Twice. In different stores. They probably would have understood bluetooth, but IR was incomprehensible to them.  In the end, all the gesticulation and running around got me nothing. The local sporting goods stores don't carry any attachments for the cardio systems from any maker. No footpods, no extra straps in smaller sizes, no USB IR dongles.

Bud suggested that I go to the running shoe store I patronize, and ask there. Odds are that they will carry it, but I was kinda hoping that I could find it somewhere below the factory list price. No specialty running store would discount something like that. However, if they carry it, the also probably have someone working there that could talk me through uploading data. The instructions that come with the systems have been translated from Finnish and they are not user friendly.

FWIW, I think I'll get a fairly decent price through the gym.

It is often a shock (especially to us long-legged people) to discover that running faster does NOT mean simply taking longer strides. It means taking more of the strides that are the right length per minute. So instead of CLOMP..........CLOMP..........CLOMP, you want to run thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud. And that clomping that took you two seconds? Yeah, all those thuds should take you two seconds, too.

You feel like a cartoon character of a running person at first. It feels really strange. But then you realize that you are going much, much faster.

Think about the physics of it. When your foot is pushing off the ground, you get forward force. If you get that forward force only 120 times in one minute, you only have so much forward force you can apply. But if that forward force is pushing you forward  240 times a minute, you are going to go forward faster. Now that's assuming that you are applying the same amount of force with each stride. After all, we can push ourselves to a small hop, or we can push to a big leap. But I'm thinking that you can't push twice as hard as easily as you can push twice as often. Cars don't produce more force per cycle when you step on the gas. They do more cycles per minute.

What separates the Olympic speed person from us average folks? They are pushing harder with each of those very fast strides. Their strides are longer, but they are also putting in a lot of them each minute. I got a chance to talk to a guy that could run very fast and enjoyed it. He describes it as floating along with your feet touching the ground tip,tip, tip and off you go. He had so much forward movement, that to him it felt like he was almost in a Flintstones car, just tapping his feet on the ground to go zipping down the road.

I'm still trying to track down sources, but the word is that the suggested pace for healthy walking speed (for cardio benefit) is 100 strides per minute at a minimum. Slightly faster for some folks, but not really much slower than 100 per minute. So all those folks with pedometers, counting the number of steps per day that they are taking? It will be much more useful if the majority of those daily steps are well above an amble.

I was leaving the gym this morning after chiding myself on the shameful amount I time I spend showering because I add in time in the steam room. I was watching a couple of the women that work in the day spa show up for the day. Their long, curling hair was done, they had on a horrific amount of makeup, they were dressed in what I suppose is the latest fashion, and were wearing platform heels. Their purses rivaled my gym bag for capacity. Their jewelry matched.

I was wearing jeans, my insulated hunting boots and no makeup. I keep my hair so short that I'm wondering why I condition it these days. Instead of a fashionable coat, I had on the L.L. Bean parka that I've had since 2001. Someday, I'll replace it, but there really is no need to. I said a cheerful goodbye to the door attendant and headed out to the parking lot to climb into my truck. As I was walking, a thought popped into my mind.

My mother didn't raise me to be decorative. My mother raised me to be practical, independent and capable. Thanks mom!