Say Hello to my Little Friends — Chinese “Dwarf” hamsters. And maybe name them?
Mar 31, 2008 Pets & Animals
So in between writing my first article for Triond, submitting my second article, an image, and finally falling into a coma for sleep–it occurred to me in that dream like state of peaceful drifting off and drooling into my pillow that it was terribly quiet.
There’s no rrrrrrrrrraaaaKA KA KAKAKAKAKAKAKArrrrrrrAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWHIRRRR of a single seed being jostled about by a tiny little body running in a wheel. There were no melodious strains of teeth coming away from a metal bar they’ve been chewing on for six hours straight, no rattle of wood chews being dragged through a plastic tube. No, alas, our nights were missing such things.
We decided to change that today with the addition of three little boy Chinese “dwarf” Hamsters.
If you’re curious, here’s a little wiki entry about the general breed: Chinese Hamsters@Wikipedia.org
And an excellent Dwarf Hamster site for other breeds: All ABout Dwarf Hamsters
These little guys claim to be the most affectionate, less bitey of the hamsterian legion of awesomeness. So far, what I’ve seen of them appear true. Instead of biting, they’re more prone to sniffing and/or running away. They’re more social than Siberian hamsters and can often live together. Siberian hamsters, of course, should never be homed together as they will fight each other to the death over food and territory.
I originally was set only to have two in our lives, but as fate saw it, there were three and I did not want to break them up. The third would have been kept alone and would have been unable to acclimate to another little herd of hammies, as we all know since I am made of squishy goo-ness in the middle I couldn’t have that happen. So we brought all three of them home.
So far we’ve brain stormed on what to name them with some help from the people I know and love on my Live Journal. Here are the suggestions so far:
Nibble, Chew and Squeak
Captain Jean-Luc Rattard, Commander William T. Rattker and Lt. Commander Ratta
Huey, Dewey and Louie
Abe, Baker and Charlie
Many, Moe and Jack
Lucky Day, Dusty Bottoms and Ned Nederlander
Athos, Porthos, and Aramis
We’re looking for more suggestions to name our hamsters–what would you name them?
Triond: getting paid for my content, the virgin attempt.
Mar 30, 2008 Computers and Internet
We all know I’m not the world’s finest writer. I sentence fragment and splice as well as forget punctuation all the time but I can tell you what drives me nuts and keeps me from reading a blog and becoming one of those rare loyal readers we bloggers keep hearing about.
So I wrote an article about Five Reasons Why You Can’t Keep me as a Reader and submitted it to a website called Triond.
I’d recently discovered Triond via a random Stumble. Triond is a website for all kinds, genres and skills of writers to submit their writing and get paid 50% of the revenue generated. Of course, that depends on how popular the article becomes and how many people read it. So far, I’ve already one curmudgeonly response! I’m moving on up, baby!
It’s been fun writing until my face falls off, again. I haven’t spent this much time hammering away at the ol’ ivories in a very long time. Maybe it won’t make me perfect, it probably won’t make me amazing or breath taking either, but it’ll certainly help me grow and find my voice. That’s always a good step in the right direction!
Tags: baby steps, Writing
Political Cowardice Disguised As Olympic Spirit
Mar 29, 2008 Rants
As a conservative, I’m usually not one to call for political activism. I tend to prefer the ballot box to the soapbox. Displays like tying one’s self to trees or not buying from Giant Evil Company X “because they are mean to children and puppies,” is better left to the vast morass of leftist nut-jobs. This year, though, I’ve got to pull one from their playbook: I simply cannot, for any reason, understand why every one of the leaders of the free world are not instantly boycotting the Beijing Olympics.
I understand the grand history of the Olympics. That warring nation-states and disparate tribes put their differences aside for the glory of athletic competition. This is just wonderful, it’s also nicely meaningless. The world has changed since then. For instance, back then, some of these same competitors killed children when they thought them imperfect and viewed women as property. Now, children are “just so darn precious, it takes a village to raise them right,” and woman aren’t just the equals of men, well, heck, they’re better! Just ask anyone!
China isn’t any better than those glorious misogynist pederasts of yesteryear. The vast yellow horde has been openly killing of its own young (and old for that matter) and the rest of the word should just mind it’s damn business about it. They are brutally oppressive; just ask Tibet, Taiwan, or heck, just watch that good ol’ footage from Tiananmen. Free-speech in China is as realistic as free love in a whorehouse. In every way the cripplingly authoritarian leadership in China stands opposed to everything that the “civilized” nations of the world stand for. We are, however, asked to ignore this… anyone care to ask why?
Because, in the words of The speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, “”I believe a boycott of the Beijing Olympics would unfairly harm our athletes who have worked so hard to prepare for the competition.”
Well, how ‘bout y’all fancy athletes have a seat at the table and have a big ol’ helpin’ of “get the fuck over it”. The minor unfairness you might suffer practicing a sport that no one really gives a crap about anyway is pretty minor compared to the unfairness the Chinese people suffer every day.
Pelosi, supposedly, is a big anti-china leader amongst the lefties, but she’s ok with us participating in the games out of some misguided sense of fairness. Britain has no intentions of boycotting under any circumstances, apparently, likely including open nuclear aggression, because the “games are sacred”. France is going to ‘wait and see” how well China behaves. “Well gosh, killing Tibetans for speaking is pretty bad, but let’s see if they do something really nasty, like make people work 5 whole 8 hour days in a week!”
The scary thing is that out of all the so-called “enlightened” countries who are hiding behind this “Olympic spirit” bullshit, we’re being put in our place by Germany. Germany! The god-damned Nazis are telling us that we aren’t being hard enough on the dictators! To be fair, the Germans (and Poland and The Check republic are also on board) are hiding behind carefully crafted speeches about how politics should play a part in the Olympics, so they’re staying home. But at least they’re saying something!
Times have changed, folks, time for the big boys to stand-up and stay home. Your athletes will get over it, the Olympics will survive, and may even be stronger since a little bit of backbone on your behalf will give them a heck of a lot more meaning.
Four a.m. cup of tea.
Mar 29, 2008 Personal
As I am growing older, more insane and sprouting chin hairs long enough to let children swing like monkeys from them, I realize that I have well and truly screwed up my sleeping schedule.
I think it’s my brain. The brain that keeps me up until noon the next day writing silly blog entries about cat snot and my husband’s gas, the brain that tells me it’d be awesome to do a comic about my life with cats then reminds me that it’s a lot of work. And yes, the same brain that likes pink, shiny things and decorates her desk with Christmas L.E.D lights all year around while plastering Disney stickers from one end of it to the other. (Gosh, I just don’t know why I never sleep!)
I have some good nights and some bad nights. The L.E.D lights around my desk come in red, orange, blue and green. They’re cherry sized spheres scoured in little triangles to soften and throw the colored lights out in a bit of a glow. They fall against my desk and make miniature rainbows in the pink mardi-gras beads I have hanging from my upper shelf for no reason other than they are pink. And shiny.
Everything in the house is sleeping. My husband is snoring away, reminding me of the tide crashing along the shore and smashing boats into little pieces while passengers scream and are broken against the rocks. The cats aren’t chewing on my feet, hands, head or trying to get me to feed them by sitting on my face. The fan in my computer is a low whirr which moves air at a pace I imagine stately southern women fan their faces in the height of summer. There is no creaking of feet against the pre-fab wooden floor, no dog barking because some one a mile away sneezed—its stillness, in its noisiest, calmest form.
On good nights, it’s comforting. Despite the loud silence, it’s the living sort of silence which reminds me that the world’s just taking a nap as my brain zips along at crack snorter’s speed.
On bad nights, it can be a lonely sound, making me wish for the song of the birds at five am and all the horrendous caterwauling of everyday that means this house is awake.
On either of these nights, good or bad, as long as it is sleepless I tend to like to sit down at my desk and have myself four a.m. tea. Green tea, to be precise, of whichever variety I wish to try at the moment (though Gen mai cha, white monkey, chocolate and citron green (a unique flavor from Adagio) are my favorites at the moment) and go through a little ritual.
Source: WikipediaI use loose leaf teas because they smell like healthy, nature, wild leaves and some times like the tea my grandmother and parents drank. When it’s brewing, depending on the type, the leaves like to unfurl just as I’ve watched my cats stretch in the middle of sun naps, languid and slow. There are more colors than just green too, occasionally I can see red, brown, yellow and orange, spices as well as bits of stem too. For the three minutes or so it’s brewing, I turn into an idiot kid and shove my nose right over it. My glasses fog immediately so I can’t see anything but my mouth as well as my nose is filled with this wonderful, steam-scent of brewing tea. It builds anticipation and it builds a memory for me to hold onto until the next cup.
Drinking it is when I can just stop—read maybe, be slovenly, take my time through my own thoughts when I’d usually be zigzagging at a million miles an hour.
It makes the screwed up sleeping schedule not so very important. Or the thoughts. Or the worries about bills, or the silence, or the laundry which I need to do, or the floor that needs to be swept, or what I said seven years ago –oh my god I was such a dork—all of that floats away for a time.
It amazes me how utterly simplistically complicated creatures we are as human beings. That a ritual of tea, or coffee, or a moment even though sleepless, can leave us feeling so very much as peace and give us a few moments to remember how easy it is to grab a chunk of joy to keep for ourselves.
Life can sure do it’s best to keep the blinders on us, trying to fool us into thinking there’s nothing but despair, sorrow, and that attaining happiness is a long drawn out, expensive nearly impossible affair involving pills in addition to therapists. We can so easily forget to just stop and be.
What is your four a.m cup of tea? What is it that you like to do to just shed the stress, calm the mind and find some happiness for yourself?
Where have all the clean themes gone?
Mar 28, 2008 Computers and Internet
Let me start this off by saying that I am truly, truly thankful to you brilliant web designers and CSS gurus out there who can make a word press theme seem as if it were as simple as breathing.
I can tell you how to change link behavior, change the color, put a background behind something and maybe remember how to do hover over’s on a good day, but when it comes right down to it—creating a WordPress theme that works, really works and looks good and is widget supportive and is full of awesome? I got nothing.
I’m a free user. Luckily there are a plethora of people out there that get CSS klutzes and WordPress newbies like myself and make these wonderful themes (such as the one I’m using right now. Hiya Jai!)
So don’t get me wrong when I now complain about the complete and total lack of simple, elegant design.
When I visit a blog and when I am writing my own, I want the eyes drawn to the words. I want people to see the content first. I don’t want them to pay attention to the ads, the blinking banner ads, the rotating giant ‘subscribe to my feeeeeeed or I will eat your SOULLL’…I want them reading what I have to say. I know that whether or not they’ll come back is up to me, but first impressions are hard to repeat. When it comes to a blog design, I want to see words first—glittery slide out, up, sideways and upside down menus later.
So imagine my surprise this morning as I am searching for ‘Simple and Clean,’ ‘Elegant and Simple,’ or just ‘Simple’ WordPress themes, how very little actually came up. Several sites had designs for WordPress releases in the 1’s. A few had a handful of simple layouts that went the extreme of simple (just because it’s black and white doesn’t mean it has to be entirely boring.)
It’s very difficult to find a design that can be attractive, easy on the eye, well done and pretty to look at without detracting the eye from the content. Shame on you, guys. Shame. What ever happened to simple, anyway?
Thank goodness for blogohblog.com, or as you may recognize Jai better—the creator of this very theme we are using right now on 2phatgeeks, Simple-la-Bob. Several of Jai’s themes convey a minimalistic approach with enough care and style to become something wonderful to look at even though there ‘seems’ to be not much. It’s exactly what we like—a customizable header, a neat and clear presentation with writing as the focus and a splash of color mixed in to keep the eye from getting bored. Also perfect to showcase the many pictures I like to take, share or draw.
Imagine my surprise however, in visiting Jai’s site that I notice that not only does Jai offer free templates, but give-a-ways to Premium templates. All you gotta do is blog about it and make sure you leave a track back to be entered.
This weeks design is Trueblogger, and to borrow famous person’s words, croinky, she’s a beaut. Though two columns isn’t something my husband likes it is a sweet damn theme. Jai says that it has:
1. Unique Design & Layout.
2. BBC Style News Ticker.
3. jQuery based scrollable News Section.
4. Separated Comments & Trackbacks.
5. Stylized Comments.
6. Widget Ready.
7. Fully XHTML Compliant.
8. Easily editable CSS file.
9. Web 2.0 Appeal.
So if you’re interested in getting in one some kick-assery in the theme winning department, I recommend you start blogging about it and trackback-ing now! If you’re just in for a really awesome, clean and simple free theme, you can still visit and browse what’s there to grab.
So good luck guys and gals, if you enter—and thanks Jai for making templates that rock my socks without being giant monsters of garish, overdone whosits and whatsitmabobbies which take away from my oh-so-awesome content!
Why I am the crazy cat lady, in honor of upcoming ASPCA day, April 10th.
Mar 27, 2008 Pets & Animals
If you haven’t already guessed, I’m one of those animal people. You know which ones I mean, too–I don’t see any difference in life. A life is a life is a life. Should a cat be beaten to death for no reason other than it was a cat, defenseless and something to beat, I am heart broken, angered and upset. Should a baby be beaten to death for no reason other than it was a baby, defenseless, and something to beat, I feel the same way.
Some of us get a lot of flack, we’re told a cat isn’t as important as that baby, or that prisoner in war-torn country. That we should feel more sympathy for the innocent children being shot, than some tom-cat the neighbors kid shot for sport in their backyard. And I don’t understand this reasoning at all.
Why should I put an importance, a hierarchy, on life? Why is it that a rich man’s life is more important than a bums? Why is my life more important than a starving child in famine riddled country? To me, they aren’t. I don’t remember where I read it, who said it, or where I found it–but somewhere, someone wrote, life is sacred, everywhere.
It is something I believe. I’m not here to preach or push this down my reader’s throats, but I wanted to share parts and pieces of the reason why I feel so strongly about protecting animal life, too.
I strongly suspect how we treat our animals, our environment, reflects on how we treat each other. I don’t support companies and groups that employ guerrillas tactics to scare people into their folds, but I support learning how to be a better human.
If you agree with me and would like to learn how you can take steps in starting to help animals in need, please take a moment to visit your local shelter’s website, SPCA, or humane society/shelter. Also, on april 10th of this year, it is ASPCA day. To learn how to support ASPCA day, you can read more of my post on this or visit the ASPCA day web page directly.
Thanks guys and gals!
Tags: ASPCA, causes, Feathers and whiskers, Fur
