What A Lovely Christmas Present

Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science has awarded me A Roar for Powerful Words. This is a project launched at The Shameless Lions Writing Circle, that celebrates the best and most powerful writing in the blogosphere. Being totally lacking in modesty, I am quoting Sandy both on what the rules are, and what she said about me when she awarded it. Not only would this make me blush if I were the blushing type, but it also sort of identifies what kind of a blog this is, which I've never been exactly sure of.

As part of this honor, I’m to name three things that I believe most important to powerful writing and then pass on the award to five blogs I believe deserve recognition.***Maya’s Granny — Joycelyn Ward writes the most heartwarming, comforting and cozy blog that makes you feel like you’ve been invited into the folds of her family. It’s a lovely-written family historical diary sprinkled with sage and inspiring insights to life.

Three things that I believe are most important to powerful writing are:

1. Accuracy. There is nothing more upsetting than being convinced by a powerful statement and then discovering that it was based on lies. That doesn't mean that a writer doesn't sometimes make a mistake -- that is sometimes unavoidable. But it does mean that those mistakes made are not due to sloppy research or outright twisting of data or facts. The bloggers I have chosen all fact-check carefully. I know I can trust that they are telling me the facts to the best of their ability to find them out.

2. Carefully considered. The writer has done the work necessary to take the facts and show me how s/he got to the conclusion presented. I don't have to agree with that conclusion. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. But I do have to see clearly how the writer got there.

3. Honesty. Two of the bloggers I've awarded write from a depth of personal experience with such honesty that it sometimes takes my breath away. Being willing to stand naked and say, "This is me. This is what I am feeling and thinking and how I sometimes come short of the ideal."

&c. I also like passion, humor, and creative word play.

Six blogs I believe deserve recognition (yes, I know it is supposed to be five, but I already cut the original list twice and I just can't cut it any more. The one good thing is that since Sandy recognized me, I can't recognize her, and so I'm not listing seven.):

Sharf-fu at Angry Black Bitch who has passion and humor. She writes in the vernacular, in the tradition of Mark Twain. Shark-fu lives her beliefs. She volunteers at the women's shelter, teaches sex education, is a mentor, cares for an autistic older brother, and still has time to write for us, to tell us not only what she thinks but give us "yummified" recipes and enjoy vodka crans.

Blue Girl, Red State, whose sidebar reads "Deal in facts and check the sources." This is a "twit free zone." In covering political issues, you know she comes from a liberal perspective, and you quickly learn that her opinions are backed with facts and understanding.

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast is one of the first political blogs I discovered and I read her daily. She covers a wide range of mostly political topics, always well written and thought out. I have linked to her posts on a number of occasions, because once Jill has said it, I can't improve upon it.

Echidne of the Snakes is the other political blog I discovered when I first started reading blogs. Echidne writes five days a week, and her friend olvlzl on the weekends. Both do excellent research, have well considered opinions, and write well. My day doesn't feel complete if I haven't visited Echidne.

Laura at I Promise Not To Laugh During The Seance, who writes powerful words because of the honesty of them. Laura is a recent widow with two children, one of whom is in the hospital at the moment. Her willingness to share her pain and despair, to pour out the doubts and fears she experiences, as well as the moments of joy, demand respect.

And, finally I am adding a sixth roar, because I can't not. Never That Easy, a young woman who has been wheel chair bound for a long time now and writes with grace, humor, and truth about her experience with a "condition" for which there seems to be no cure and little alleviation of the constant pain.

Miscellaneous Odd Things

I eat pistachios daily for my blood sugar. And, I like them. Since my blood sugar will raise when I first get up if I don't immediately eat, and since I often wake up an hour or more before I eat breakfast, I keep a supply in a big glass jar by my computer and nibble a few while blogging in the morning.

Pippin also loves pistachios. If the shell is partly open, he can get his teeth in there and open it. Then he eats the nut, leaving the shells whereever they fall. I try not to let him have them, since I don't like stepping on pistachio shells and I don't want him begging or stealing food.

A couple of weeks ago, he waited until the waste basket next to the computer desk had about a two week supply of shells, and then knocked if over and had a field day. And I, of course, was stepping on shells even after I thought I cleaned them all up.

So, I started putting the shells in a plastic bag and tying it closed every day, so that if he tipped the basket, the plastic bags would spill instead of loose shells. More fool me. Friday night he tipped over the waste basket and ate holes in all the plastic bags, spreading pistachio shells all over the floor.

For a few months, I've had this odd thing going on with comment moderation. I would sign in, and dashboard would tell me I had one extra comment to moderate. So, even when there were none, it said one. And then tonight when it said two, I went to moderate and, by golly, there were two comments. One dated from February! After I moderated them, just to check, I signed out and then back in and sure enough, dashboard didn't say I had a comment to moderate! Now, where in cyberspace do you suppose that comment had been?

Should This Concern Me?

I have seen a number of blogs with ratings recently, and decided to see what mine is.


This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* bitch (2x)
* piss (1x)

Amazing. I have Angry Black Bitch and Bitch PhD in my blogroll, and list The Great El Paso Piss Off of 1955 in my best personal writings list, and they show up in my blog rating.

Do you suppose people go looking for blogs by their rating? That having a PG rating I will attract or repel readers? Does it mean anything at all?

Should I write a few more moderate potty words somewhere and start attracting a more jaded crowd? Should I try for a G rating and somehow use euphemisms more often?

Should I care? Or, should I take the track that feels right today and be amused?

New Blogger - Help

So, I've changed to the new blogger and mostly it seems ok as it is. However, for some reason it has added my profile picture right under my other picture.

I went to change the template, but since I'm not certain of how to get the pictures that Julie put in my original template back and I'm not certain I want to re-enter all the blog links and links to other posts that I've worked so hard on, I reverted back. That leaves me just fine except for two things -- how do I get rid of that profile stuff right under my picture and how do I get a list of labels in? Or, how do I get my photos and other customized items back?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

How They Come

A while back I decided to get a site meter. I wish I'd known before how much fun they are and I would have installed one a long time ago. Every night I can check it and find out all sorts of things. I love the world map which shows the last visitors.

I was astonished that there are people who visit from Australia and Korea and Egypt, as well as more places in Europe and Canada and the US than I would have guessed. How amazing. I sit on my mountain side in Alaska, and people from anywhere in the world not only can read what I've written, some of them do!

I can check to see who's on now -- my sister in Kotzebue and someone in Dayton and me, at the moment.

The next thing I discovered was the "by referrals" record, which is how some of you were finding out what people were looking for when they came via Google or Yahoo to your blogs. And it is amazing! The number of people who are looking for spanking blows my mind. Some of them are interested in discipline, and some of them cause me to blush! And then I think, someone who is interested in erotic spanking must be disappointed when they read my post on the few disciplinary spankings I received in my life. And I have to admit to being a touch shocked at the number of people looking for erotic grandmother spankings. What a sheltered life I've led, and I always thought I was pretty adventurous.

A number have come looking for directions on how to fix a garbage disposal that someone has run potato peels down. That reassures me, somehow, that my mother isn't the only person to do that. People have also been hopeful they could learn to remove pomegranate juice stains and fix a broken door knob. And all I have to offer is the information that other people have these problems, too.

For some reason, there seem to be people looking for Hooligan poems--I do hope they aren't disappointed that mine are about cats. Also about Granny poems. A number of people have come looking for help with restless legs syndrome. Sorry that I only reported that I have it -- should anyone find this post with that need, I use two coral calcium tablets and a quarter of a 5/325 mg Percocet tablet at bedtime and another quarter Percocet tablet at 4 a.m. if needed.

People have come looking for Santa and "Barbie head Christmas tree." I got a number of people interested in knee high gladiator sandals, white coats for men (I think they may have wanted to buy one, instead they got a couple of horror stories about dentists), decorating the tree, chipped incisor, cherry pits, drowning peacefully (I'm not sure which post got caught in that Google search), "why did grandma add a wheel to her rocking chair" got them the Lakota Grandmother's Cat. Olive tree and baby giraffe and mood rings and the Haight Ashbury, as well as the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia have drawn in their share of visitors.

Apparently my great-grandmother's great-grandmother wasn't the only person who read books "civer to civer" because people have come looking for that. And someone besides Richard suffered some kind of "pizza hurt".

The search engine in Japanese looking for doll and the ones in Arabic, Hebrew, German, and French gave a nice international flare to the whole thing.

Anyway, my site meter is a very fun toy.

Molly

You may have noticed a blog mentioned on my blogroll, Molly Saves the Day. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the link no longer worked. It took me to a commercial site instead of where I wanted to go. Since I like Molly, I would try the link every once in a while, thinking that while obviously someone had managed to do something to her site, somehow she would fix it. Didn't happen. So, I did a blog search for Molly Saves the Day, which netted me the following links/articles.

Hear Me Roar

Axinar

and Biting Beaver

I have no idea what to say. I had no idea such things could happen. Did happen.

I wish there were a way that I could express to Molly how outraged I am at what was done to her and how much I will miss her.

But, more than that, I wish there were a way that I could stop such cruelty. That such behavior were never thinkable to anyone. That all people felt secure enough and loved enough that hating others simply didn't happen.

My Computer

The part I need to fix my computer has to be shipped. Before we can order it, Richard has to take the computer apart and see which of the possible alternatives it is. Before that happens, Richard has to get enough over his cold to walk up to my apartment. (And, no, there isn't anyone else I would trust to take my computer apart.) Then we have to hope that the snow lets up enough for the plane to land and get it to us!

We've had school closed two days this week because of snow (we can go years without that, we have good snow removal provisions) and planes are only getting in at a scattered rate. So, until I get the part, you will only see me on days when I work. Unless something unexpected happens, that means not only not this weekend, but also not the four days over Thanksgiving. Bummer! I love blogging. I don't want to spend a day away from it, talk about four days!

This feels like the television plug, except that it wasn't caused by my misbehavior!

Were You Worried?

As I was getting ready to publish today's post, my computer stopped. Small popping sound, black monitor.

Have you ever tried to start a car when the battery has been stolen? No crank, crank -- just silence. That's what happened when I tried to restart my home computer. I don't know if it is totally dead or not, if I will be doing replacement or repairs, but it isn't working now.

And then . . . . . Ta Freeking Da . .

It has been snowing in Juneau since Friday. Lots and lots of snow. Monday and Tuesday the Care-A-Van couldn't get up my hill and I had to take cabs. Well, cab. There is only one in town that has four wheel drive and studded tires. Only one that can make it up my hill when the roads are like this. This morning that cab was out of service until after 10. So, I got to work at 10:30 and had to proof my program annual report and get it to my director before I could do anything else.

And now -- here I am. Alive and well. Until the home computer problem is solved, I will be publishing later in the day and not on the weekend. Not to worry.

Today's real post below.

Something Odd

An hour ago I was looking at my blogroll and I noticed that something odd had happened to it -- most of it was gone. It went down to Dilletante's Progress just fine, and then it said "Dri". What?

So I went into my template and everything on my template after the Dri for Driftwood Inspiration was simply gone. I know I didn't do it. I know you didn't do it. I haven't a clue how it happened.

Anyway, by going to the blogs left on my truncated roll and linking and copying from there, and by doing a couple of google searches for things I could remember but wasn't finding on other peoples rolls and by tracing back some from comments, I have most of them back. However, since I had divided my roll into groups of 10 and no groups with either more or less, and now I have one with 12, I know I haven't completely rebuilt it. If you are suddenly off, I will figure that out soon and put you back on.

Meanwhile, anyone who has any idea how that could have happened, I'd like to know. I'd like to guard against it happening again. And I'd like to know how my template could be messed with.

A Story for the Grandkids

I was over at One Good Thing, reading about how Flea's cats figured out how to open a Tupperware container with ten pounds of sugar in it and how her husband cried out,"No!! No!! God, no! What have you done?!" Instead of getting upset, she had her husband help her (by tossing the cat and the sugar he had cleaned up back on the counter) take a picture of the mess and how that had turned the frustration into a funny blog post. I remembered recently when Julie got a very bad ear of corn served in a restaurant in a town famous for its corn and took a picture of that for her blog and I realized that I have been doing this sort of thing long before the Internet. These days we say, "I'm going to have to blog about this," and I used to say, "This is going to make a great story to tell my grandchildren" and the problem would reduce from admitting of no solution into narrative.

When Julie and Richard and I first moved to Alaska, in the 60s, we lived on a homestead outside of Fairbanks. It was in line with power poles going further out and so had electricity, but no indoor plumbing or phone, and was heated by a potbelly stove, which is a lot more romantic to read about than to live with. Waking up in the morning to discover that, yet once again, the fire has gone out and there is ice on the water you intend to brush your teeth and bathe with, is less fun than you might imagine. Coming home from work to no smoke coming out of the chimney is an absolute downer. So, I replaced the potbelly stove with an oil burner, with three 50 gallon drums connected and placed on a platform outside the window. At first it was the most amazing thing. No one had to feed oil into the stove, just fill the barrels periodically, and the rest of the time gravity fed it and the house was warm.

Until the snow began to melt. What my 16-year-old nephew Tony and I hadn't realized when we installed the stove in January was that the ground we put the barrel platform on was frozen and would thaw come spring. Which it did. Not some day when it would have been convenient to discover the problem, but one night when I was alone out there, with two small children and the car stuck in the snow! The back end of the platform was sinking down and settling into the mud, and there was no oil high enough to flow into the heater. The kids were asleep and I was frantic. I couldn't get them out of there in the car. I couldn't walk them out at that time of night and depend on there being any traffic when I got us to the road. No phone meant I couldn't call for help. We had hiked out earlier and called Tony from a neighbor's and he was coming to help me get the car dug out the next afternoon, but that was a long way in the future and they were already exhausted from the first walk. And the house was getting colder and colder.

I tried everything I could think of. Nothing worked. There was just no way to get any oil from the barrel up the slope to the feeder barrel and back down to the heater! It looked like we were going to freeze with 120 gallons of oil right there, just at the wrong end of the gravity feed. And so, as I had done since I was about seven years old, I found myself saying, "Boy, this is going to be a story to tell to the grandkids!" And I started telling it in my head. "I tried a hose and it broke from the cold," I said (I had and it had), "and I tried jacking up the lower end of the platform, but I wasn't strong enough to manage that (I had and I wasn't), why I even tried pouring oil from the lowest barrel into a measuring cup and then pouring it into the highest barrel . . ." and there was the answer! I was able to get enough oil where it needed to be to hold us until Tony and his cousin Davy came out, three of us with two jacks were able to get the platform leveled again, we built a floor under the legs of the platform (which we tended every weekend through break-up), and Bob's your uncle, we had heat.

So, thank you Maya. Before your mother was even as old as you are right now, Granny saved the day by telling you a story.

Why Not Do It In Public?

So, I say in my masthead: Sometimes I fall on my face. Why not do it in public? And what do you know, my good friend Kate e-mails me that, in the masthead, I have misspelled accumulate!

How I Came To Blogging

So, last week I posted a comment on a blog I enjoy a lot (Pureland Mountain) and Tabor asked who I was and why I didn't have a blogsite. I got to thinking about that. Why didn't I? My daughter does. My son-in-law does. Several friends do. I'll bet I know people with blogs and I don't even know they have blogs. It certainly looked like a fun thing to do.

Besides, do you know what it means when I say I live with two cats? It means that I don't have a captive audience (who understands English) to tell all my adventures and thoughts and the minutiae of my life to. I have friends, but surely once in a while one of them would like to talk! It can't always be all about me. And yet, I have so much to share! I like hearing what is happening with them, but I am left feeling that no one really knows everything that is happening with me. And it is so interesting, surely they should! Surely they don't want to be left out!

And the thing you have to know about me is that I was once the ultimate oney-oney (only child). I was the oldest child of two oldest children. I was the first child, grandchild, great-grandchild, niece in the family. They hung on my every word. They thought I farted attar of roses! I recited nursery rhymes and counted and they thought me brilliant! It only lasted for five years, but it gave me an appetite for it. I love being the center of attention. I can get up in front of crowds and talk about anything and never get flustered. And I never took up acting because my own words are so worthy that it seemed a waste to recite someone else's.

And since I was born on the birthday of Shakespeare and Shirley Temple, the stars may have made me this way (says the skeptic who doesn't believe in astrology but who did say she contradicts herself).