The Neon Nurse's Charting

I had one of those days where you churn briskly all day, but in the end don't have much of anything interesting to say about all the stuff you were doing.

So here is a joke I have been saving up.

A youngish looking fella walks into a bar in Texas and asks for a beer.

The bartender says, "Got any ID?"

The young guy says, "'Bout whut?"

I added a section of plywood to the bathroom floor today. My plans had been to do both areas that need fixing up, but something else popped up I had to do instead (see codeneonblue.net for details if you have the slightest interest). So maybe tomorrow.

The other thing I did was move my trailer forward a few feet. The mulberry bush/tree next to it has grown a few more feet since I last took the trailer anywhere, and it was starting to block the door. You wouldn't think moving a trailer, a thing with WHEELS, would be a big chore, but hey, this is me and my trailer we're talking. I had to clear that part of the driveway, move all the support posts and bricks, find the bumper hitch and put it on, and then actually do the hitching and moving. Turned out that last part was the easiest, because Mike is actually quite good at helping out by watching me back up and telling me when Dreamcloud is in position. Yeah, it SOUNDS easy, but trust me, it's NOT.

So I'm a little cranky from having a sore neck and back from hoisting bricks, and a little more cranky than that from mild yet ongoing frustration from extracurricular activities I can't really detail here because, you know, bees. And the internet.

I didn't even get to watch Heroes tonight! But at least they are offering it on Netflix Instant Watch (instant in this case = Wednesday), so that can be remedied.

Probably I should just go to bed. Tomorrow is bound to be a better day.

My serious intention to post SOMETHING everyday seems to have hit a snag. I think part of the problem is that if I fall behind in responding to comments, I then feel guilty about posting yet MORE posts that will just put me FURTHER behind with the nice folks who take the trouble to say something back to me....

So this is a cross-post from CodeNeonBlue, as the political content is pretty much bipartisan. :)

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Woo, my CodeNeonBlue.net blog is now officially a BLOG -- I've gotten four spamments this evening!

I took advantage of the lovely fall weather to do some yard work, which means my brain has now copied my body and slowed to a crawl. So how about a jolly trip to my Handy-dandy Link Locker for today's post?

I like quizzes, even when I'm not very good at them. This one asks you to name as many presidents as you can in ten minutes. You even get a 'gimme' for presidents with the same last names!

I hadn't played it in a while, so from a cold start I got 34 out of 43. I am good with the 1920s to today, but am made of fail re the 19th century.

Are you among the 27.55% of people who can name them all? Click here to find out!

Ever since I cleared up my desktop a bit, it has been a favored nap spot for the cats. This did not escape the clone's notice, and so one of the things she requested for her birthday was a cat bed. Or I should say, a fuzzy rectangular cat magnet.

Sandy (Mike's blue/cream tortoiseshell) isn't a BIG cat, but she nearly fills the bed. Paws, however, is undeterred by a mere challenge of what will physically fit in a given physical space.



I think this cries out for a Lolcat caption, don't you?

The clone's birthday falls a few days after mine, and this year she got a present from Mother Nature -- rain! Here is a shot of Mike at her birthday outing. (Not as damp as the fish from mine, although he would have been, had he been outdoors.)

We don't send him to school in this shirt, because it is too true sometimes. If you can't quite read it, it's a variation on the famous Gary Larson cartoon about the difference between what we say and what dogs hear. "Blah blah blah Ginger, blah, Ginger, blah..."



I had been putting off that annual fall ritual, the lighting of the pilot light and on-turning of the furnace, partly out of a wish to not start burning propane any sooner than absolutely necessary, and partly because lighting the pilot is a huge pain. But it had at last gotten chilly enough inside that I knew I had to bow to the inevitable.

But in a classic good news/stupid news scenario, I found I had never gotten around to turning the pilot light OFF last spring. So yes, I am a forgetful spend-thrift and waster of precious natural resources. But at least I dodged the pilot relighting bullet of annoyance!

When your big weekend accomplishment is cleaning up your Firefox bookmarks. Well, one section, at least...and a little email and back comment replies as well....

Last week just kind of whooshed by at light speed. You know about one highlight, my birthday, which was very pleasant. Um, let's see. I got the final phone call I was waiting for from all those medical thingies I had at the beginning of the month. The little polyp they kept for a souvenir was benign, but the assistant doing the phoning told me I should be sure to have a follow-up...in five to ten years. Dude, I have to write myself notes when I need to buy milk and cat food the next day! Telling ME to remember is not a real workable plan.

By the way, in exchange for the Polyp of Remembrance, they gave me COLOR PHOTOS of the sightseeing tour. I decided not to post them here. You're welcome.

They aren't my good side, anyway. My good side being my OUTside.

I know I have more newsy news to relate, but I'm blanking, which probably means I should have tried writing this post at 1:45 this afternoon, instead of now, 12 hours later. But one thing I decided after sorting through my many, many saved links was that I need to actually SHARE those if the reason I have gone to the trouble to bookmark them is...to actually share them. So I am going to try to post SOMETHING every day from here on out.

Or every night. Whatever works, eh?

My friend found me this great pic, which I just had to share, since the resemblance is so uncanny in my dreams.



Yes, I have made an icon from it!

For my birthday dinner, we went to Green Garden, and got to sit at the fish table!



As the perfect end to a self-indulgent day, I am going to head off to bed soon. How pleasant is that?

...can also be a tremendous pain in the, um, household.

Smiley's former owners ran into Caro again last week and asked if we were SURE we didn't want her. They'd already given her away once, and the people brought her back the next day.

So we caved. Sunday Mike went down to say, yes, thanks, and seal the deal.

Yesterday I bought her a pretty red collar with rhinestones. Yesterday SHE peed on the floor and my bed, once each. Today, she chewed up a dishtowel and my purse.

Caro thinks we should change her name, because Smiley sounds like a minor character on The Sopranos. Also because Mike has the habit of pronouncing it "Smelly".

I am leaning towards Nightmare Death Mutant Hooligan Pup from Hell.

Except she really IS a Smiley McFriendlypants. Even if the cats don't buy it.

(Rocktober TM Gov. Bill Ritter, in honor of the Colorado Rockies best season ever!)

I thought this bit from the Oct 16 Rocky Mountain News about the post game fun downtown deserved to be preserved:

“By 1 a.m., the crowds are dwindling and the cops are still smiling. No tear gas has been dispersed; skulls have not been cracked.

“The World Series should be nothing,” jokes one of the officers. “But at least it’ll be a good warmup for the DNC.”

That’s going to be a WHOLE NOTHER ballgame.

(Cross-posted to http://codeneonblue.net)

More from me later, I hope!

This post is just a little update of this and that. Thank you for lowering your expectations.

I'm hoping to be able to attack the next big chunk of the bathroom project this weekend. The week after Jerry finished the plumbing, I made a strong effort to run around town and get the supplies I would need to finish things up. Would you believe it, even after I bought it all, the stuff just SAT there! Didn't make the slightest effort to jump up and install itself !

I did manage to shim up and screw down the sink/vanity module, so it doesn't wobble. I also assembled a nifty piece of furniture, a little cupboard thingie with a laundry hamper bin and some shelves.

Plus yesterday I put together our new toilet paper holder. Mike named it Nitro Flamingo.



You can see the top of the new toilet, and also that the wall needs painting. I have an idea I want to try. We are going to first put down a coat of good solid white over the orange. Then, to go with our theme of fish/ocean/lighthouses, I'm going to buy some polyurethane, tint it blue, and roll it on over the white, lighter towards the "sky" and deeper (more layers) nearer the floor. I figure if it doesn't turn out, we can always go over it again with regular paint. But I am hoping for an interesting water-ish effect. We'll see.

Wow, what a week! I was like the little silver ball in a pinball machine, bouncing from one thing to the next over and over. Except the pinball never has to carry boxes of books...or do much of anything, really. So I guess it's not such a good analogy.

One of the things I was doing turned out to be a lot more complicated and take much longer than I expected. Which made it pretty much like every other project I ever started, I guess....

I decided I wanted to start a separate blog for political stuff. I've got a few sites I post things on, but I'm never sure how much cross-posting I should (or shouldn't) be doing. It occurred to me that if I had my own central site, I could cross-post to THAT and keep everything political all under one banner!

Part of the reason it turned out to be hard is that the host site I use for my business and pics and site back-up and stuff had changed its rules. You can't just buy a domain name and invisibly host it within a subdomain of your main account anymore. Once I got that sorted out, it all went pretty smoothly, except for how I suddenly had a need-to-know thing going on about CSS, and I am totally not that knowledgeable. Yet.

Like how the 'skin' I picked had a lovely photo banner -- but WHY was it 1600 pixels wide? Does anyone REALLY use that as a screen resolution?!? I mean, it works okay because they have the code rigged to just show the middle. But my work-around to replace the very nice mountains with something more typical of my region was just to make my own photo collage banner, and I had to do it about 20 times before I got it right. And don't even ask how hard it was to change the title color so you could actually read it. You'd think somewhere on the style sheet would be a line containing the words 'title' and 'color'. But you'd be wrong....

So. Here is the link to my photo banner. (I didn't post it so it would show because it IS 1600 pixels wide!)

http://www.neonnurse.net/Blogs/banner_mountains.jpg

Here's how it looks on the new web site: http://codeneonblue.net/index.php/

What kind of political stuff will I post? Anything that I find interesting or funny, from the local Lamar scene on up. Like...did you know our governor, Bill Ritter, has declared this month to be Rocktober? Because of the Colorado Rockies rocking out in the baseball world?

Well, now you do!

You know, just yesterday I had what seemed like a lovely, jolly, almost task-free week ahead of me. Well, not counting Friday when we have to go to the Methodist rummage sale and then help set up the Friends of the Library sale for Sunday. And something else is that day, too, I think....

Anyway. I had an appointment for a general check-up yesterday, a Well Woman grant thingie. I figured it would take about an hour. Which it sort of did, but I hadn't counted in the time for the mammogram. And all the extra waiting around that goes with being shuffled to four different medical venues. Plus they also asked if I wanted to test drive a free colonoscopy. I figured, hey, free, what could be bad, right?

Well, the prep for it is not so fun, I can tell you that right now. First you drink a bottle of magnesium citrate, which is never going to bump Pepsi off the shelf, right after your "light lunch". Dinner is clear liquid and a laxative pill, and THEN we get the party started.

You have to drink a gallon of cherry-flavored Stuff (tastes like bad Gatorade, and I was never a big Gatorade fan in the first place) between 6pm and midnight. Yes, I have spent quite some time today studying the bare floor and broken-up walls in my bathroom....

I am almost done with the drinking part, right on schedule. But after midnight I can not has cheezburger, unless it invisible cheezburger. I can not has ANYTHING to eat or drink. Then tomorrow the clone drops me off at the hospital so they can break out their camera on a stick and go on a fact-finding mission in my series of tubes.

Then Thursday is Parent/Teacher conferences and also a townhall meeting with a roving "Blue Ribbon" panel on fixing up the health care system here in Colorado. Friday I already told you about. Saturday is Octoberfest and Sunday the library sale.

Nice task-free week, huh?