Must sneak one in....

Before I retire for the night, I wanted to post one picture of the new baby. I need to tell my nephew his hands look like a giants' hands next to the little bambino. My nephew is on cloud 9 + 900 along with my sister and her husband.

More photos of my Grand Nephew, Sunsets, Grand Niece at my webpage. Link is in the right column, blah, blah, blah. I have added a new feature - screen savers with the Photos. Whoopee.

Golden

Sunset from the hill. Somewhere in Ohio. Somewhere close to my house, but on a hill where you can actually see the western sky and not your neighbor's house. The park was full of ball players, walkers, cyclists, cars and squirrels. No dogs. No pets allowed.

The Easter holiday stretches out before me. Almost every day is filled up with socializing of one sort or another. My daughter said she does not want to go anywhere or do anything. She is depressed with not being able to see her beau. She did speak to him on the telephone last evening.

I do have most of Saturday free so that I can make my part of Easter dinner. We travel about twenty miles to one of my sibling's houses this year. Not very far.

I remember Sunrise Service when I was young. We would get breakfast in the basement of the church afterwards. One of those little boxes of cereal and half a banana. Some years I would have a new Easter dress. I remember two favorites. One pink and one yellow. My older sister would polish me up until I was shining. I wasn't allowed to wear the dress anywhere but to church. Only once to school for picture day. It was such a special feeling. It was also kind of silly. Somebody paid good money for that dress and I only wore it a few times.

After church we returned home to hunt for our Easter baskets. Once mine was in the oven (not an easy task for Easter day - not sure how the bunny pulled that one off). Another time it was in the clothes dryer. Once my brother's was hanging from the ceiling in the place of a plant. That was funny.

We would have so many colored eggs that we couldn't eat them all. Oh, and back then we didn't know you were supposed to refrigerate dyed eggs. Ours sat out in the basket for weeks at a time and we still ate them. (That might explain a lot).

One time my brother, myself and a bunch of neighborhood kids played ball with a bunch of eggs. What a waste. I just remember pieces of hard boiled eggs flying all over the neighbor's yard. Somebody would pitch an egg to the batter and they would swing and "egg explosion". Wow. I am so glad we didn't think of that with the extra tomatoes we had in our garden in September. Most of them rotted on the vine and my brother and his friends would enjoy throwing them at me and my girl friends. Nasty boys!

It looks as though we get another seventy-some degree day today in Ohio. I think the rain sets in this evening or tomorrow. My daughter did rake the yard (YAY!) into about three piles of pine tree twigs and the neighbor (the one whose tree did the depositing) told us we can just throw it onto his burning pile. They will have a bonfire every other Saturday night during the summer months.

Time to get outside and get moving. I have had the windows open in the house for the past two days airing out the stuffiness. The cats have been killing each other for window post seating. They have to get a running jump for the bathroom window. I laughed because I expect one day they will overshoot and the screen will give way. Or maybe that is just wishful thinking. No, not really. We are one story so they wouldn't have far to fall and I would have to go outside chasing them. I can't let one of my babies out there in the wild with strange dogs, cats, squirrels and teenagers racing their cars up and down the roadways.

Wow. I am impressed. Spellchecker only stopped on the word YAY. I must be awake. Of course, if I ran it again it would stop on the word Spellchecker. Yep, it wants to change it to splices. I see why. Spell checker is two words, Peruby. Two separate words!

Pink jag

Hey - wait! The baby was a boy so I should be posting in blue. Oh, darn. He was born at 12:45 a.m. today. Another April birthday.

I am so darn tired tonight. I have postponed the hospital visit until tomorrow when my sister can be there. I have heard that baby and parents and grandparents are all doing fine. Relief. Apgar of 9.9 (which tells me either there weren't too many drugs involved or this is the second reading). Hey I just Googled the word Apgar and found out it is an acronym for Activity, Pulse, Grimace, Appearance, Respiration. Named after Virginia Apgar in 1952.

Okay, I don't think I want to know what they do to get the poor baby to grimace. I know what I do to get a grimace.

1. Think about my daughter and her boyfriend.
2. Think about the mess my pets are making or have made.
3. Think about a staff meeting.
4. Think about the rising prices of gasoline.
5. Think about how hard it is getting to post anything on this blog anymore.

There are more, but I am just too tired to think.

Network topic for today: Before you e-mail friends and family pictures be sure to resize the file so that it does not exceed the mailbox limit. A quick and nifty re-size program I use is called Irfanview. Free, dependable, easy to use. Lots of features for a free package.

Waiting...

I am waiting to become a Great Aunt for the second time. The doctor sent the expectant Mom to the hospital at 3:30 p.m. My nephew and my sister are on pins and needles waiting. This is my oldest sister's first grandchild. It will be a boy. They already know.

Mom also has a son from a previous relationship. He is nine. I am so excited.

I work tomorrow and then I can go to the hospital and visit!

Above picture is a forsythia bush from my Park adventure yesterday. Blooming beautifully!

Network term for today: DCOM - Distributed Component Object Module. Possible buffer overflow that could allow a worm to attack a network resulting in a denial of service attack.

Sunset through the trees

I took an hour this evening and went to the hill at the top of our town park. Most of the shots were taken through some huge but beautiful pine trees. I didn't mind. Although I felt like I had camera bulb flash or welders flash in my eyes. When I looked away out across the grassy park after taking the photos everything looked foggy. I thought 'Wow, what a day for picture taking'. And then I realized it was not that way really, it was my eyes.

Stress in the teenagers life. Her boyfriend got in trouble and she can't see him for a week, maybe longer. That is their entire spring break. I feel bad, but I won't have to worry about her sneaking him into the house while I am at work.

We are melancholy tonight. I just spoke with his Mom. Tough lessons, tough teenage life.

Today's network topic: smurfable. Many networks are understaffed and poorly managed. They are still quite "smurfable." See, I can talk about work without mentioning work.

I should be cleaning

You can read all the books you want on how to tweak your digital photos, but I have more fun experimenting on my own. I found this feature in Photoshop's Filter, Blur, Twirl and just can't stop. Below is the original photo.

giggle, giggle.

Radial

And with her tummy full of popcorn chicken from KFC, the happy (now) 15 year old fell asleep playing her new video game Kingdom Hearts II. Mom sighed and began to clean up the carved ice cream cake. She neglected to get a picture of it before everyone tore into it. Ah, well. Maybe later. Into the freezer for now.

Outside Mom found the sun shining, the birds chirping. The yard is going to need some serious care this week. The neighbor's huge pine tree has deposited so much debris this spring. The daughter is off all week for spring break. Think there is any chance of getting her to work off that extra $30 she ran up on the cell phone bill buying tokens for her PC game online? Maybe.

cans

Photo Friday Challenge - Organized.

This one time

at the video store I brought my daughter along. She was a toddler, just learning to walk. She got away from me and ran into this back room that had the swinging doors like a saloon. I reached down and grabbed her up in my arms while she giggled away.

I cast a sidelong glance around the small room. Porn, porn everywhere. Was my face red as I carried her out of the back room!

I got clouds

I have plenty of cloud pictures to post. I'll grow weary of it soon, so bear with me. I am taking my camera today. I have no idea what the weather is going to be like. We haven't turned our television on in days other than to watch the movie Spirit.

The wind was pretty chilly when I let the dog out this morning.

I think today is going to be an easy day. Yesterday was pretty rough. I think I have the problem solved. Time will tell. A local network was being attacked. Not like a terrorist attack but by a packet storm. It appears to me as if it were internal.

A packet storm is when a machine or a group of machines flood the network with packets of data that will eat up the bandwidth and render a network useless. End users could go nowhere and do nothing because there was no bandwidth left for them.

A couple of technicians along with myself attempted to determine that source of this culprit machine. Hah! Can you say spoofing? We were chasing phantoms.

Here is what I did that I believe will resolve the issue.

Reach for the sky

Another sky picture from my drive on Monday. I increased the hue and contrast to get that pretty blue sky.

I am headed off to another location tomorrow. My camera battery is charged! Woot!

Post, post, post, post, post.

I'm gonna post and post and post my pictures. The skies were awesome in Ohio yesterday. I almost did not take my camera on my travels. I am so glad I did. I am touching them up just a tiny amount with the hue and contrast features. I also added the lens flare to the cloud one the other day. It looks as if I were in an airplane taking that one.

Above is a back road somewhere in rural Coshocton county, I think. It was a delightful drive.

My picture posting problem happened sometime between 7:30 a.m. Friday morning and 7:30 Saturday morning. I am trying to narrow it down to see if I had changed anything in my Mozilla to do this. I can't recall anything.

I had one of the best times Saturday night I have had in a long time. Other than the cigarette smoke which makes me sick. I laughed so hard, too. Both created a splitting headache. I did have migraine medicine with me and within an hour the splitting ache was gone. We played Euchre, which I was a bit rusty at but held my own.

Somebody had brought watermelon pucker Schnapps and mixed it with vodka and 7-up Plus. I had two of them (long before I took my medication) and I ate afterwards. They were very good. I finished the evening up with Ginger ale. What else?

Can you believe this 7-up product? Fortified with calcium and vitamin C? The only thing is the Splenda which my have contributed to my headache. I never could use Nutra-Sweet, either. It was all the rage back in the 80's - to drink diet pop. I finally figured out where my headache a day was coming from and cut out the diet soda.

The Cloud Maker

Whew! Got it. Advanced Java Script Options. (Allow scripts to change images). Take that!

Whatever. The above is a smokestack from the city I visited today. We nicknamed it the Cloudmaker.

Deselect Blogger Image Gracefully

Wah! I thought for sure my problem would be fixed today. My page source reads the same as everybody else's, now. I didn't change anything in the header.

I guess I'll have to dig deeper. It does read in the photo html post:

"parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully" as if I am posting porn or something. Maybe I have hit my 300MB image posting limit.

Oh, the picture above (if I can sneak around and tweak this post so that it shows up) is from my drive today. I had a myriad of cloudy skies to see today.

My pics will post without incident in IE, just having problems in Mozilla. Sigh.

Edit: Advanced Java Script Options. (Allow scripts to change images).

Yuk, yuk, yuk

What is Atom API and why does every other blog source code refer to it but mine? Still working on my "posting images" problem and I began to view other bloggers source code. Everyone that I have viewed (from blogger.com) has this in their header:

link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title=

but mine. :(

I hope it isn't one of those alphabetical things. My blog page being in the W's. It's like school all over again. Go to the end of the line. You're last.

In Blogger Status Issues I was reading about the Atom API. It doesn't help when the "more information" page goes nowhere. Dead links. Ppphhhttt!

Alright! That's it! My cat just threw up for the second time this morning! Puking cats, broken links, Atom API (whatever the hell that is) - I'm losin' it!

Challenge

This is the back alley behind my house. I am about the only one who uses it. There is an elderly lady behind me, but I have only seen her drive twice in the four years I have been here. All the other houses around me have front exits to the street. My garage is in the back of my house, so I pretty much get this alley to myself. Unless somebody is lost or coming to visit me.

I have a little challenge. My pictures are not posting in Firefox (unless I remove the not-a-real-namespace that I mentioned a couple of posts ago). However, they will post normally with MS Internet Explorer. I normally use Firefox. My site meter rainbow cube isn't showing in either browser.

What little time I had to read up on this has mentioned Norton Anti-virus being a suspect. So, this post is a test of sorts.

Edit: 10:30 p.m

Well, I had a little bit of time tonight to look at things. I was able to get my rainbow cube to re-appear from sitemeter (I also lost it on my personal web page). It was showing up in IE. It has something to do with javascript and onblur. I recall trying some javascripting months ago on my blog site, but can't recall what I was trying to do. I must have left something in there and something somewhere got updated and it threw things out of whack on my pages. But, only in Mozilla Firefox. I'll continue to chip away at it. In the meantime, I have to be sneaky to get my photos to post. Sigh.

Edit Edit: Advanced Java Script Options. (Allow scripts to change images).

They should be sleeping

I came home to find my daughter home, but her friend was no where in sight. I took my dog out for a break thinking about what to do when the girl's mother drove up to my driveway. I finally got my daughter to give us a name of a boy (twenty year old) that was with her 15 year-old friend. After calling and waking four families with the same last name as the boy, the girl walked into my back door.

Her Mother took her home.

I told my daughter I didn't want to see that "friend" at our house again.

What? Not a real name!

My photo wouldn't post until I editited Html and removed the "not a real name" nonsense from the code. What's up with that?

If you are trying to post and this is happening, choose the Edit Html tab at the top of your post window.

Remove the following section from the code:

("src="http://not-a-real-namespace/")

Click Publish Post and you should be okay. Good luck!

Edit: Advanced Java Script Options. (Allow scripts to change images).

Under the lilacs

I can't wait for these babies to bloom! I love lilacs. For fragrance, I put them right up there with my moonflowers.

My world has been a little crazy the past few days. The teenager and the pets are all still here and all have their chaos going on around me. Tonight I am taking a break from all of them and getting out. Looking forward to that.

I have been up for two hours and do not have anything accomplished other than reading the newspaper. I got caught up in the releasing of the 911 recordings of the WTC tragedy. A very sad read. All my gifts are wrapped for tonight's party, so I am ahead of the game. I have to make the food fixings, but that should be easy enough. I don't have my taxes done. I supposed I can work on them. I did them myself last year, and I think I will do a repeat this year. Not a lot of complications going on in that area.

My daughter turns 15 on the 7th. I have been looking into the whale watching tours on the Northeast coast. I have looked at New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maine and New Brunswick areas. I am a bit concerned about seasickness. I read where one tour hands out tootsie roll pops to ease the queasiness. I am also interested in the dolphins and other sea life. I don't want to drive, she doesn't want to fly and she also turned up her nose at a train ride. Maybe I should wait until she gets her drivers license. I love to drive, it's just that I normally do a lot of it on the job and a vacation is getting away from the job.