Black Friday Tourism

Stolen from Bearfootden blogger:

Black Friday Tourism - driving around and taking pictures of all the silly people in line for sales.

Just had to share.

NaNoWriMo

Yep. I finally did it. Signed up as an official participant. There's still time to join us. Go to http://www.nanowrimo.org to sign up, though you shouldn't be surprised if the servers are having trouble keeping up today. The Australians got a head start on the rest of us, of course, and there are always those who joined the parties here in the US last night and stayed up all night writing and got that extra hour of writing time from the time warp called the Daylight Savings Time shift.

Having grown up in Indiana, I think the whole daylight savings time gambit is a hoax of some sort perpetuated by a conspiracy of unknown people who profit from the foolishness in some way. But as you can see, I don't have the characters OR the plot fully fleshed out for THAT story, so I usually let it pass without comment other than -- oh hell, I have to figure out how to reset the braille watch without shutting it off. This used to be a much more difficult problem when I drove, since I often wouldn't or couldn't figure out how to reset the clock in the car until it was almost time to switch back, by which time I was used to subtracting an hour every time I looked at the thing, and so then when I DID get it changed, I'd start having those panicky moments of horror whenever I'd glance at the damned thing all over again soooo . . . Needless to say, it's one of the many anxieties that I gave up when I decided the vision was too low and I needed to quit trying to drive, legal or not. And, funny thing, since I quit driving and now rely on paratransit, I'm either early, on-time, or I don't come at all. An interesting mix of circumstances which lends itself to perpetual knitting projects and a snicker or two at the people who were always irritated when I was perpetually late due to my seemingly congenital inability to leave the house without doing JUST ONE MORE THING! I can now leave the house without doing "just one more thing," but still feel the pinch each time I go out the door. I don't think it will scar, though. The "one more thing I absolutely MUST do, however, is correctly fasten the crate door on the Husky's house, since Kala herself is STILL completely unable to resist eating my books when I'm gone if left free to munch any paper she chooses. She's excellent about resisting the books when I'm home, but the smell of binding glue is too tempting when left on her own for more time than it takes to walk one of the other two dogs.

Now, having procrastinated my morning writing for as long as I can justify, and having refilled my coffee cup, it's time to see about my preparations for this month. Caffeine, check. Left-over Halloween candy, check. Plenty of soups and instant meals, check. Plenty of cat food and kibble to allow the rest of the household to bide? Check. Cheerleading team? Check. Blatant self-promotion on Facebook to shame me into finishing? Check. New Blind-girl accessible netbook? Fully functioning and primed with outlines for all three acts of the novel and character descriptions, not to mention brainstorming sessions. All legal jump-starts. Fifty thousand words? Holy Crap! (grin) Okay. So, not so scary after the 100-page master's thesis, but still. Very different. Sad to say, I wrote most of the thesis in a month, too, after about four to six months of preparation. But I DID revise the thesis. Not revising this until December might actually break something inside me, some teacher-perfectionist function I might need again later. But then again, I might NOT need it again later, either.

I'm willing to risk it. I kind of feel in the mood to break a few things for the fun of it, and wine-glasses in the fireplace just aren't as thrilling as they were when I was nineteen. My own "little critic" voice is so well entrenched that I'm pretty secure in the fact that a bit of breakage won't permanently damage anything essential. She'll still be there to keep me from anything too drastic, maybe. (grin) Reconnecting with high school and college friends in the lasts year has really undermined MANY of my more grown up tendencies. I'm still paying bills, and eating vegetables, and doing laundry, mind you, but a bit of recklessness and unconstrained energy seems much more in order these days. Hence the official participation in NaNoWriMo. Are you SURE you won't join in?

Twitter Fully Accessible

Just a quick note. I gave in to the social pressure and decided to try twitter. Much to my delight, the site is FULLY accessible for the blind and JAWS works with it seamlessly in Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. The site includes Skip tags to jump over navigation links or to jump TO the sidebar which is located on the right, thankfully.

I’ll only be using Twitter from my laptop, since I don’t have a phone with TALKS, but I’ll be happy to let anyone know how it goes. If you’re already on twitter and want to “tweet” with me, I’m Shelob001 there.

It was just SO nice to find a fully accessible site!

–shelob

Dalmatians

moar funny pictures


Couldn't resist, having known the breed so well for the last fourteen years!

Walking in Midnight Snow

It's coming down in sheets of white speckles against the blackness -- barely snow, but not sleet. Everything around it is dark, but it clings to cars and grass, disappearing on the pavement and sidewalk. Have you ever enjoyed the first snow of the year with a husky? She's like a kid at Christmas: wide awake, bright eyed, and eager to go trot around and enjoy the air, the cold, the snowflakes, and the leavings from this morning's trash pick-up. (laughing) Okay, so maybe not quite like kid, who I hope would go for the pies rather than the old turkey bones!

So, About my Tattoos

I acquired my woad tattoos over the summer, and I must admit, I’m interested in going for more. (grin) Don’t worry. Woad tattoos only last a week or so, so I’ll not be piling design upon design. But this urge to add design, even in a semi-permanent form, is new to me. It actually caught me by surprise, since I’d only planned on doing something small around my ankle. But the compulsion grew with each addition, and pretty soon I was tattooed to my right knee on the one side, and to mid-calf on the other. (grin)

My enthusiasm certainly was catching, as many people I didn’t think would try the fun joined in. By the time we were done, at least seven or eight people were flashing woad tattoos, and several had more than one. Ankles and toes were favorite spots since summer sandles were being worn.


Most people were also in the midst of dyeing various hanks of yarn, shirts, shorts or sweaters in the huge vat of blue dye, so frequently designs hat to halt mid-application and be picked up again one the more immediate problems had been attended to.


This was also an interesting experiment in terms of design. Those on the right leg were more fluid, sweeping, and certainly looked better on MY flesh. I tried a more angular look on the left and wasn’t all that thrilled. My flesh does not do angles. (sigh) ah well, I can admire angles on others.

despite my disappointment with my angular bits of staining, most of the celtic knots, dotted patterns, and swirls turned out well for me and for others. One thing to keep in mind is that we had not actually PLANNED this tattooing extravaganza, so -- all the designs were painted on with a wooden coffee stirrer! (laughing) When we decided to go primitive, we went all the way!


And I must admit, my legs haven't looked that interesting in years -- not without stockings! I left the party with painted legs, some wonderful naturally dyed Saxon Blue sock yarn, an over-dyed summer shirt, and a soft woad blue dyed lampshade cover that I'd knit a couple of years ago. It was a great party, and anyone in the area should join in the next time True Blue Fiber Friends has another Saxon Blue Party -- you never know what you'll come away with!

LOLcats

Loved this one. Looks like a cat I had, the incomparable T.S. Eliot.


moar funny pictures

Back To Work

The title of this post has a number of meanings. I’ve been working steadily on my knitting for the past few months, and I’ll get to those goodies soon. Yet I’ve also been working steadily on my head and on my skills in functioning in audio over the last few months, on my acceptance of those skills and my belief in their efficacy more than anything else.

This process, of course, required that I come down from the high alert, fight-flight-freeze mode generated by the drop in vision in March and the subsequent weeks of doubt, anxiety, and frantic appointments with doctors. From that time, I’ve several book recommendations to offer: From Pema Chodron Awakening Compassion, The Pema Chodron Collection: Pure Meditation, Good Medicine, and From Fear to Fearlessness, How to Meditate with Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape, and most especially, Getting Unstuck. From H.H. the Dali Lama How to Practice, How to See Yourself as You Really Are, and The Universe in a Single Atom. You’ll notice the Buddhist trend? (grin) Having gone through a second round of CBT classes while my mother was still visiting, I’ve been even more fully impressed with the fact that I have to work very hard to meld logic and emotion into a more sound and balanced way of handling such occurrences as my increasing blindness and my history with domestic violence.

I’m not instinctively a very physically active person, being much more inclined to think of a book and some knitting rather than a walk – though I enjoy the walk thoroughly if I think to go take it. I miss living half a mile from the state forestry in Indiana, and perhaps that is part of the problem. Having spent so much of my adolescence wandering there, it’s hard to get excited about a park with paved walkways. Having gone camping and canoeing for weeks at a time with nothing but tents and backpacks from the time I was ten, it’s hard to get excited when people talk of camping with Winnebago’s, showers, and trucks. Mindless exercise like treadmills or even my palates machine quickly wears thin and the dust gathers on the gadgets. But meditation, and yoga as a form of meditation, not to mention the bare beginnings of the Ti Chi I’ve begun to learn, I find both satisfying and ever renewing. Odd, that. But there you have it.

As for getting back to work being employed as a teacher, while I accepted the skills rationally, and recognized how much I can do with a computer that talks, (grin) belief in such things emotionally requires another level of understanding, and belief strong enough, stable enough, to stand against the doubt of others and the need to educate those in the rest of the world as I encounter them. In making my way back to the working world, back to my teaching, I am, finally, having to face my blindness in ways I have not accepted it before, if only so I can learn to trust in my ability to function competently and handle questions and doubters adroitly.

I’ve been volunteering in a local yarn shop for the last few months, and I’ve enjoyed the dependability of the position and MY dependability in the job, as well. I’ve also been experimenting with making knitting and crocheting stitch markers and with selling them or trading them. This has been going well, though it’s not something that will ever feed more than my yarn habit – at best. I focus on making up cute, inexpensive markers that people can use and not be too upset if they loose them. Eight dollars for a set of six or twelve dollars if I’m using semi-precious stones like moss agate or fancy jasper. A percentage goes to the yarn store, and I had some nice success when the store took my markers to Stitches in Chicago, so I’ve decided to keep it up. Maybe someday I can make a profit from the hobby! Ya never know.

This has turned into more of an update than a show and tell, so I’ll finish off this entry, and then work on another that focuses on pictures of the fun I’ve been having. More soon!

I Didn't Cheat --- It's just WRONG!

Okay, I swear I didn't cheat; the silly quiz is just WRONG! Calm? Zen? Hippie? Okay, maybe a bit in terms of ethics. But the rest? Balanced? Calm? Wow.

You Are Mint Green

Balanced and calm, you have mastered the philosophy of living well. Your friends seek you out for support, and you are able to bring stability to chaotic situations. You're very open and cheerful - and you feel like you have a lot of freedom in life. Your future may hold any number of exciting things, and you're ready for all of them!

What Color Green Are You?

Words to Live By

Stolen from Sethra at Porter Family Pursuits

Words to Live By


Do Not Meddle in the Affairs of Dragons for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.

Ain't it the truth! [grin]