Yeah, so I got tired of the old design. Finally found one that I could live with. Yippee!
Yesterday I did something I've wanted to do since I was a child, and that I've been planning to do ever since I moved into my house.
I adopted a dog.
Sonnet is a sweet, precious Pekingese, and I adopted her from Pawtropolis in Athens. She was rescued in March from a puppy mill, along with 273 other dogs. I can't imagine. They tell me that she was so filthy and matted when they got her, that they bathed her every day for five days straight. In the end, they gave up shaved her. They also told me that when they first got her, Sonnet seemed to be traumatized. You could set her on a table and she would just stand there, wouldn't move, no matter the encouragement.
She was also VERY pregnant when they got her back in March. She had six puppies while with her foster family, and all but one have since been adopted. Over the months since, she's been spayed, vaccinated, and developed into such a sweet, mellow little dog.
So, after browsing websites literally for months looking for just the right dog, I discovered the Helping Paws Rescue program at Pawtropolis and saw Sonnet's picture and description. I knew I wanted a calm dog, an adult dog, and a female. Her description seemed to be exactly what I was looking for:
I put in an application and waited. That was a Saturday. On Monday, I got an email saying that after having almost NO people interested in her for months, THREE applications had been placed on her over the weekend. I waited during the week as the rescue folks contacted the other applicants and finally contacted me for a meeting at my home on Thursday.
Sonnet's foster mom Kathie was great. She gave me lots of information, as well as training tips and encouragement. By the time she left, she was confident I would make a good home for Sonnet. I heard from Amanda at Pawtropolis on Saturday, and about 1:00, the adoption was complete, and I could take her home.
She is such a good dog. She's house trained and crate trained, although she didn't much like the crate last night. We're working on that. She's sniffing and wandering, learning the environment, but if I'm home, she pretty much just wants to be wherever I am.
I'm so excited to have her. I'm looking forward to us getting to know and love each other. I know she's going to enrich my life immensely.
I adopted a dog.
Sonnet is a sweet, precious Pekingese, and I adopted her from Pawtropolis in Athens. She was rescued in March from a puppy mill, along with 273 other dogs. I can't imagine. They tell me that she was so filthy and matted when they got her, that they bathed her every day for five days straight. In the end, they gave up shaved her. They also told me that when they first got her, Sonnet seemed to be traumatized. You could set her on a table and she would just stand there, wouldn't move, no matter the encouragement.She was also VERY pregnant when they got her back in March. She had six puppies while with her foster family, and all but one have since been adopted. Over the months since, she's been spayed, vaccinated, and developed into such a sweet, mellow little dog.
So, after browsing websites literally for months looking for just the right dog, I discovered the Helping Paws Rescue program at Pawtropolis and saw Sonnet's picture and description. I knew I wanted a calm dog, an adult dog, and a female. Her description seemed to be exactly what I was looking for:
Sonnet is such a sweet mellow girl. She she is already housetrained and cratetrained. She bonds very well her to new family and enjoys laying around watching what is going on. She does like to occasionally entertain herself with a chew bone or toy, though her energy level is moderate to low. Sonnet is so loving and will make a great family pet.A couple weeks ago, I finally went and met her. What a little angel! My dad asked me, "Are you going to fall in love with the first dog you look at?" Well, maybe I did, but I felt like I'd been searching for so long, and I felt like her description was just so perfect, that if she really did have the personality Pawtropolis said she did, there wouldn't be any question that I wanted her.
I put in an application and waited. That was a Saturday. On Monday, I got an email saying that after having almost NO people interested in her for months, THREE applications had been placed on her over the weekend. I waited during the week as the rescue folks contacted the other applicants and finally contacted me for a meeting at my home on Thursday.
Sonnet's foster mom Kathie was great. She gave me lots of information, as well as training tips and encouragement. By the time she left, she was confident I would make a good home for Sonnet. I heard from Amanda at Pawtropolis on Saturday, and about 1:00, the adoption was complete, and I could take her home.She is such a good dog. She's house trained and crate trained, although she didn't much like the crate last night. We're working on that. She's sniffing and wandering, learning the environment, but if I'm home, she pretty much just wants to be wherever I am.
I'm so excited to have her. I'm looking forward to us getting to know and love each other. I know she's going to enrich my life immensely.
This weekend is the Athens Choral Society's summer fundraiser show - "I'll Be Seeing You - ACS Salutes the USO." Promotions have been VERY successful, and we've got pretty much sold-out houses for all three performances. We had our first dress rehearsal last night in Seney-Stovall, and it went very well. The hall has fabulous acoustics and is a really great little theatre space. This is going to be fun!
I very much enjoy a good comic strip. Some of them are lame, some just not funny. But SOME really cross the line from just okay into classic. Here are a couple examples (with help from GoComics.com):
Big Top
A screwball set of characters including a poodle/pop-star wannabe with a chapstick addiction, a trick bear with a crush on Katie Couric bordering on unhealthy, a clown demented beyond description, and a 10-year-old boy growing up in a circus and trying not to wind up too damaged in the process. Unfortunately, the creator Rob Harrell stopped writing the strip in 2007, but the reruns are still posted on GoComics' site daily. My favorite character is Stucco the clown, who manages with no dialog to be the ultimate combination of cute and creepy you'd expect in a proper clown.
Dog Eat Doug
Alternatively, we have Dog Eat Doug, which explores the antics of Sophie the dog and Doug the baby, two completely typical creatures trying to learn to co-exist to each other's advantage. There is no snark here, no cynicism. This is just the demonstration of how two non-verbal creatures find ways to communicate. That's not to say the strip doesn't have dialog - Sophie thinks at Doug, mom, and dad all the time. It's just you know mom and dad don't understand - and Doug does when he chooses to. Lock up the cheese, and prepare for significant drool!
And of course, everyone's favorite Calvin & Hobbes. I don't need to wax eloquent here. I merely mention it to put a button on the end of this post:
I know, Calvin. I feel the same way sometimes.
Big Top
A screwball set of characters including a poodle/pop-star wannabe with a chapstick addiction, a trick bear with a crush on Katie Couric bordering on unhealthy, a clown demented beyond description, and a 10-year-old boy growing up in a circus and trying not to wind up too damaged in the process. Unfortunately, the creator Rob Harrell stopped writing the strip in 2007, but the reruns are still posted on GoComics' site daily. My favorite character is Stucco the clown, who manages with no dialog to be the ultimate combination of cute and creepy you'd expect in a proper clown.
Dog Eat Doug
Alternatively, we have Dog Eat Doug, which explores the antics of Sophie the dog and Doug the baby, two completely typical creatures trying to learn to co-exist to each other's advantage. There is no snark here, no cynicism. This is just the demonstration of how two non-verbal creatures find ways to communicate. That's not to say the strip doesn't have dialog - Sophie thinks at Doug, mom, and dad all the time. It's just you know mom and dad don't understand - and Doug does when he chooses to. Lock up the cheese, and prepare for significant drool!
And of course, everyone's favorite Calvin & Hobbes. I don't need to wax eloquent here. I merely mention it to put a button on the end of this post:
I know, Calvin. I feel the same way sometimes.
So, I've had the opportunity to watch Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. And as usual, the man drives me nuts. X{
There was SO much potential here. But it was ruined by two elements. One, the unnecessary crass sexual references. And two, an unsatisfying ending. The third act just didn't resolve with the same tone presented in the first two. I LOVE Whedon's cleverness, his musical composition & songwriting skills, and his sense of humor. I just wish he'd use his powers for more good and less - icky. :p
Still and all, I don't feel like I wasted my time. It was mostly cute. Everyone did a good job. Call it a B-minus.
There was SO much potential here. But it was ruined by two elements. One, the unnecessary crass sexual references. And two, an unsatisfying ending. The third act just didn't resolve with the same tone presented in the first two. I LOVE Whedon's cleverness, his musical composition & songwriting skills, and his sense of humor. I just wish he'd use his powers for more good and less - icky. :p
Still and all, I don't feel like I wasted my time. It was mostly cute. Everyone did a good job. Call it a B-minus.
Hooray! At last I have made it back to the beach for the first time in years! Norma and I are having a big time bumming around the Florida coast, beaching, antiquing, and generally relaxing. Norma bought a cute t-shirt that read: "I come to the sea to breathe." That's the way we both feel - just relaxy & comfortable. There's no rush, no obligation - just salt air and ocean waves.
Oh, and hey - check out the pictures from the new camera - pretty snazzy!
Well, after nearly a decade of fighting it, I've given in and purchased a digital camera. I'm finally getting a vacation that's completely recreational, and I decided I wanted to be able to take pictures without having to borrow my mom's camera or fiddle with 35mm film.Yes, I've been living in the dark ages. ;-)
Anyway, here's a review of the camera I bought. I think I'm going to be really pleased with it. It's very small, yet has a seemingly huge screen and plenty of features.
I needed a spot to test my embedded slide show of pictures of the new GACS Office building, so here it is - TEST!
Okay, I know I'm turning into a crotchety old stick-in-the-mud. I don't like change. But I've always wanted to be the type of computer user who's up on the latest software, gadgetry, widgets, etc. So, when our office was given access to the latest version of MS Office (2007), I was determined to give it a go.I checked out the reviews when this thing hit the market last year, and I was not impressed by what I saw. The interface had been completely redesigned, and the things that had been added were features I had little or no use for. From what I could see, the new version of Office would be a lot of re-learning with very little payoff.
Now that I've had the time to play with the new Word a little bit, I'm finding it's just as bad as I feared. This version might work for someone just learning the ropes, though even then functionality is reduced as far as I can see. And for someone like me who has been using the Office suite for a decade or more, the "improvements" make this new version practically unusable.
My biggest complaint with this software is that the menus and toolbars are practically uncustomizable. Any practiced user of Word has custom buttons, custom toolbars, even custom menus that contain features they've discovered and found useful enough to warrant putting "out front" - in easy reach. With Office 2007, the only thing you can customize is the Quick Access Toolbar, and that is limited.
To test out this new toy, I opened a fillable form I use on a regular basis. But wait, where are the form commands? Where's the form toolbar? Those five or six convenient commands that allow me to add fields, protect and un-protect the form depending on if I want to fill it or revise it - where did they go? Apparently, the ONLY way I can access these commands is to add them to the Quick Access Bar, and I still haven't found a protect/un-protect toggle command.
I honestly don't have the time or inclination to completely re-customize a new piece of software, especially when my current version works so well and is already set up for my needs. For now, I will have to give Office 2007 a pass, and hope that maybe the next upgrade will bring back a lot of the flexibility available in the previous version.
I LOVE Hulu! This site is just so cool. Streaming episodes of over 100 new & classic TV shows. I've tried out several old shows I'd always been curious about, not to mention cancelled-too-soon gems like Firefly, Journeyman, etc.
Most of the shows do not have their complete episode catalogs available yet, and this I can understand. It's not commercial-free either, although 2-5 30-second interruptions by one sponsor is more than manageable in my book. Some of the commercials are only 15-seconds, and some disappear completely thanks to the AdBlock extension on Firefox. (Those that disappear get replaced by a 30-second ad for advertising on Hulu, but it's a silent splash screen and easily ignored.)
Hulu and Tivo need to put their heads together and connect. If the two communicated, it would almost convince me to get a Tivo. Because fun as free online streaming content is, it's still a pill to sit at your desk to watch shows, and most of us aren't quite there yet in the tech-head department to be able to hook up our computers to our TVs, though admittedly the technology is getting easier by the day.
Most of the shows do not have their complete episode catalogs available yet, and this I can understand. It's not commercial-free either, although 2-5 30-second interruptions by one sponsor is more than manageable in my book. Some of the commercials are only 15-seconds, and some disappear completely thanks to the AdBlock extension on Firefox. (Those that disappear get replaced by a 30-second ad for advertising on Hulu, but it's a silent splash screen and easily ignored.)
Hulu and Tivo need to put their heads together and connect. If the two communicated, it would almost convince me to get a Tivo. Because fun as free online streaming content is, it's still a pill to sit at your desk to watch shows, and most of us aren't quite there yet in the tech-head department to be able to hook up our computers to our TVs, though admittedly the technology is getting easier by the day.
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