DragonBlog

All Hail Dr. Horrible!

Go here. Now. See it quick before it's gone!!!

Well, actually you'd just have to pay a nominal fee to download it. Which I just might. Because it rocked.

Dude. I didn't know Doogie could SING too! Damn!

Enjoy!

Current Mood: amused

Project Download

This Project Download thing is circuiting around the web right now, on at least a couple of the sites I frequently check. Click it. Download it. I hope it helps her, as I've been on the end of the system without insurance before. The insurance we have now is so much more precious to me because of it.

There's lots to report, but little time, so I'll leave other things for another day.

Current Mood: anxious

Food For Thought...

Just a quick post to drop this link to an interesting little video:

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/

One of the moms on my moms' forums found that one and posted it there. I thought it was worth sharing.

P.S. - HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Current Mood: busy

QSW site redesign stuff

Most of today's time that wasn't spent on the usual tasks of mommyhood or other such activities was spent on the site for Quick Shtick Writing instead. It's not up on the main site yet, as I have some quirks to iron out still, but I've got a new banner for the top made up (although that needs a slight tweak too) and I'm working on the color scheme and layout. I'm currently puzzling over why the table cell I have the blog itself in won't seem to stretch to include all of the blog. I think I'm going to have to pour over both the html and the css codes to find out where the one little bit is that's making it so that the text keeps going but the background image doesn't.

*grumble, grumble, grumble*

Otherwise, I think it's going to look nice. I've been getting input out of Brian on how it all looks and he's making some suggestions too. We're sticking with the original color scheme that we'd set up before. You can still see some of it reflected in the current "rules" page, although that's mostly just for color reference at the moment. At least it's shaping up. I just get really frustrated when I get stuck on one thing and can't figure it out. It makes it hard to move on to other aspects of the web page. Once I have it all looking nice where I have it now, I'll be able to implement it on the whole site pretty quickly though. That will be the easy part I think.

Also relating to Quick Shtick, we received an e-mail from Ruth over at Daily Cud, which prompted me to finally drop her into my blogroll so I can stop going over to QSW and clicking there instead. She liked our story, and has made some suggestions for the next one that we are hashing over. I'm not sure yet when we intend to start the next one yet. Sometime Monday at the latest. Hopefully I'll have the new site design up before then. I'm hoping to get it finished tomorrow, after we get back from "Kid Rock", which ought to be a blast.

That's all for now though.

G'night!

Photo Blogs, The Guilt-Monger, and other reasons I need to sort out my Blogroll...

Remember how I said, a while back, that I was going to break down and pay, for Blogroller? I was being all "assertive" and not going to "ask permission" to spend our money on it, I was just going to do it?

Ya. Umm...

For one, almost immediately after saying that, I saw the budget get tighter and thus - couldn't justify spending such frivolous money on myself. Besides, the next time I spend more than a few bucks of frivolous money, it's going to be to frame my anniversary gift from two years ago - a gorgeous Michael Whelan print called "Avatar", which is my very favorite of his works - that I've been meaning to frame since I got it. But I always look at our finances and say "it can wait until next month, we need the money for other things right now".

Well, "next month" is going to come soon because I want it on my wall. Heh.

So I still don't have Blogroller where I can sort my links into appropriate categories like "daily reads", "weekly reads", "web comics", "useful stuff", "photo blogs", etc. So I sometimes have let ones slip by when I wanted to follow them more frequently. I keep figuring that once they are sorted I can look at each category progressing through the week, along with my daily and weekly reads. Right now, it's all a jumble, so some of my "dailies" end up getting read every other day instead, as I get all caught up in the fact that I missed checking in on some others...

You see, I feel guilty if I get too behind on the blogs I want to read on a daily or weekly basis. I know I shouldn't. Especially on the ones I rarely comment on - like they're gonna notice I got behind - but I also don't feel I can comment on a post they made two weeks ago. It just kind of feels too late. The thought they had has come and gone and been commented on already. It's a little late to add to a conversation that has been set aside for other topics.

Photo blogs, on the other hand, are different. I did a little catching up on photo blogs on my blogroll today, some whom I haven't checked in on in a long time. But I rarely ever comment on those. I find it hard to put words to a visual medium sometimes. In some ways, visual art is a personal thing - a moment that the viewer has, which is going to be entirely different from the moment(s) the artist - whether photographer, drawer, painter, etc - had during creation. In many cases I haven't words to add in comment to an image. And, if I did, it would merely be simple words or emotions that I attach to the act of seeing it...

Haunting.
Joy.
Despair.
Open.
Foreboding.
Contemplation.
Desire.
Pain.
Uplifting.

Such words are just a description of what I either felt or saw in the image itself.

meish.org has a picture in her recent collection, called Pebbles. I'd say I felt "longing" when I looked at that one. I instantly thought of snatching it onto my hard drive and setting it as a desktop image. I didn't though. At least not yet. *grin* But it reminded me of a couple of different beaches I'd been on in the past, and I wanted to be inside that picture, stopping to inspect each stone as I left my bare wet footprints inbetween them along the beach. All of that filtered through my mind in one moment - a "longing".

Another spot I visit from time to time, pixeldiva, has had some images that have captivated me. Browsing through "July", since I'd fallen behind again, I saw one that was titled Stairway to Heaven. It struck me, for some reason. I think the one word I would attach to it would be "curious". I wondered what I would find if I ascended that staircase, and my imagination played on it, inventing tiny little stories of what I might find up there. Although I will admit that I miss the really entrancing image that used to be on pixeldiva's page before - which was a black and white of some metal screws. That image is what grabbed me and kept me looking at the site in the first place.

I'm only just beginning to occasionally get the pictures looking the way I see them in my own mind, now that I have a properly working 35mm camera that I can call my own and mess around with. But I also need to learn to take the time to bring the camera and make the stop if I see something I want a picture of. I saw a picture last spring that I wanted, but I didn't have the camera. It was a picture of a bunch of trees that I could feel were "shrieking" as they "shrank" back from the road. They were stark and leafless against the sky and lined the road in an even "hacked back" row. It moved me when I saw them like that, and I will try to get the picture next spring, hopefully, if it hits me that way again. I'm thinking I might also take a photo class at some point too - maybe come winter session - to help me figure my camera out better and learn more about how to get what I'm seeing to be reflected in the picture I'm taking.

I'm starting to think I can't just classify myself as "writer", specifically, but "artist" instead. Assuming I can start making my visual art look how I want it, as I can sometimes do with my written art.

But, for the moment, it's one step at a time. And, I still need to sort out the blogroll. But I've also learned that in wordpress there's already a way to do that. I think I'm seeing it say it has its own blogroll anyway. So, if I switch over, I won't need to pay for Blogroller after all. I'm still debating though. At least I don't think it will be hard to change my new format over to the new coding if I do it. And, I might be able to add in some fun plug-ins, as I'm keeping an occasional eye on scriptygoddess' site where some are being done. Ironically, I originally found that site as I switched to Moveable Type, only to find all the MT people switching now to wordpress...

*puts head in hands*

Some days I just don't know if I can keep up!

Anyway, I've got to do my posts on the other sites and get some other things done today. Maybe I'll post again later... maybe I won't. We'll see.