Saturday, January 26, 2002
And now, another edition of:
Eyeblog's Sometimes Accurate, Oft-times Off-base and Usually Revolting Search Requests, also known as "Do I really Want Google Discovering Ornamental Illness?"
The following are actual exerpts from Sitemeter with the actual search string added instead of the referring url. Extraneous data and real (non-search engine) referrers have been removed.
Posted by Ann @ 10:56 AM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM
Strange dream. Stan and I were watching "A Clockwork Orange" but instead of watching it on video at home, we were in a strange building, like a store or mall, but it was definitely downtown in a city. The whole movie seemed different and there were actors in it that weren't in the original. I specifically remember Diane Keaton (which is weird because Stan has always said I resemble her more than I do anyone else...so is she a symbol for me?), Julianne Moore (who would've been too young to be in A Clockwork Orange) and I think Robert DeNiro, but I'm not sure, and possibly more but I can't remember who. Then we were approached by some guy who seemed to be a mental patient. He was sort of short, maybe Stan's height or shorter, dark, curly hair which changed in length depending on the scene in the dream. He was saying some whacky stuff, and I remember we were trying to help him, talk to him, but we didn't want to get too closely involved. I think he might have been in trouble with the law, but it was hard to say. I remember sitting with Stan at a booth in a restaurant, and he was sitting opposite us and talking, and then he had to leave. After he left, I announced to Stan "Am I just a freak magnet or what?" We were a bit unnerved by that experience.
Posted by Ann @ 08:57 AM CST ..::Link::..
Friday, January 25, 2002
This is why I hate driving
Posted by Ann @ 05:11 PM CST ..::Link::..
If you can't depend on Google, who can you depend on?
Got this when submitted this site to Google today: "Your URL (http://ornamentalillness.com) has been successfully added to our list of URLs to crawl. Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear."
Whoah...is Google perchance going the way of Yahoo? I thought Google crawled the entire web. That's what made it so thorough, so comprehensive.
What's weird is that although I submitted my site to search engines as soon as I got it up in running in mid-December, I'm finding *other people's blogs that link to me* when I do a search for "Ornamental Illness," but I don't find my own. What's up with that?
So far this site appears to be completely, entirely invisible to search engines. How odd. Paranoid thoughts of utter rejection.
Oh, and I added a little pop-up flash kaleidoscope thingy in the new "Fun Box" on the right. -->
I'll add more stuff later. Not that anyone cares.
I'm having an Eeyore day.
Posted by Ann @ 04:57 PM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM
I don't really understand my dream last night. I was making some sort of ballot polling thing with paper (punch cards with chads!), yet at the same time it was digital because I was using radio buttons and checkboxes and making sure that there were no default "on" or "checked" buttons. (This is the second dream in recent memory where something digital has a physical office product type component) I handed off my duties to Stan and Tim, yet at the same time they were painting basement walls black, and there was an older man showing them how to do it properly (like Stan wouldn't know!) I also remember Tim was moving some sorts of beams around like they were rearranging the basement. Upon completing the painting project, they also completed the ballot project, but when they showed that to me, I was dismayed that they had punched out all the answers, so that no one would be able to use it properly. I was scolding them and telling them they did it wrong and would have to redo it all over again.
Oh well, at least the dream, as confusing as it is, is more "me" and it doesn't involve Drew Barrymore's email address.
Posted by Ann @ 09:23 AM CST ..::Link::..
Thursday, January 24, 2002
Minced Clams
Never give canned seafood to a dog. Never. Stan gave some of the juice that it came canned in to Plato last night and I had to clean up the mess because Stan was gabbing on the phone. I gave him a bunch of dirty looks while I carried handfuls of pukey paper towels past him to the garbage. (Stan, that is, not poor Plato).
Posted by Ann @ 01:09 PM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM
A couple separate dreams last night. In the first dream, I was watching a movie or play or something and there was an actor who was supposed to be playing Adolph Hitler but he didn't look a thing like him. In the other dream, I was online and somehow managed to log into someone else's personal computer. I was able to bring up a directory called something like "Ann's Mind and How She Thinks." I started browsing around on it and came across a bunch of things I had written. I quickly closed out of there because I didn't want them to know I'd been snooping around in their files. Spooky.
Posted by Ann @ 09:33 AM CST ..::Link::..
Wednesday, January 23, 2002
What is going on here?
I saw this in my referrers. OK...weird...since Ornamental Illness doesn't begin with the letter "D." So I start looking at the page, wondering what's going on (BTW, an aside...I found a blog on that page that Bill had been telling me about: Day Old Breadstore...guess he knows the people who do it or went to high school with them or something [and that was a long time ago kids, he's even older than moi])...scrolling down the page, scrolling, and I find an entry in red, "Dave Winer Likes It Up The Butt"...I giggle as it's sort of funny especially since Dave Winer is behind Weblogs.com (the place that banned me because I'm supposedly a spam pinger). Go ahead...click on "Dave Winer Likes It Up The Butt." It goes to ME! What the...? What is going on here? So, let me get this straight...somehow someone submited this journal to weblogs.com under the title "Dave Winer Likes It Up The Butt"?!?! Good Grief. I don't know whether to laugh my head off or be paranoid.
You know, I don't care how who likes what or where...just keep me out of it, OK?
Posted by Ann @ 06:02 PM CST ..::Link::..
Glasses
I got new glasses yesterday. They're a little narrower than my old ones, per the advice of the eyeglass technician. She said because of my blind as a bat strong prescription and because I opted for a material that was stronger so it wouldn't scratch as easily that I should go for the smallest frame possible. I so dislike small frames, I really do. I know they're popular now; everyone wants to look like a bad fourth grade yearbook picture from 1967. But I also hate having to rotate my neck to see upwards instead of just looking up with my eyes, you know? My prescription is very strong, so there's a marked difference between what I see in the center of my vision where my lenses are and what I see at the periphery. Also, I have a longer face. Narrow skinny glasses look fine on people with wide faces, but people with longer faces look better with large glasses. Why don't fashion designers think of that when they start dictating coming out with different fashions for lenses? Not everyone's face is the same shape.
Thank heaven for contacts. It's not for vanity's sake. It's for many other reasons.
These glasses are also boring a hole in the side of my nose. Even though my left lens is the heaviest, the hole is on the right side of my nose. Go figure. Weird. I'm taking them back today so they can put bigger nose pads on to distribute the weight more evenly, as well as have them polish the edges of the lenses so I don't see that white ridge of unpolished lens material. Ick.
Did I tell you I hate glasses? I sure wish I could wear my contacts 16 hours a day like I used to.
Posted by Ann @ 01:43 PM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM
My dreams just keep getting weirder. Last night I dreamt I was at some sort of teen hangout/fast food restaurant. I was there with Stan, and I remember seeing a friend there from high school; she was the manager of it (I think it was MacDonald's). I remember Stan was talking with her and having an argument on the way management treats its employees...it was like he was working there part time or something. I remember a lot of dark and neon colors (kinda like this journal?) and there was art, like it was partly an art exhibit too. It's really hard to explain, some of the art was sort of on the outside of houses, like my house and my neighbor's house. I remember some sort of scullpture that was an alligator and there were ants crawling up the back of the alligator and coming out its mouth. Everyone who was there, though, seemed to be arguing. There was one immature guy who was really pissing me off, so I poured a coke on him, which caused him to get even more pissed off and I don't know if he attacked me or what. There was music playing in the background, and I found it difficult to hold a conversation, so I suggested to some of the people there that we go to a different part of the building, which was sort of like a theatre. And this is the REALLY weird part (as if the previous part wasn't weird enough)...I was looking at the back of a frozen tv dinner package and there was a listing of various Drew Barrymore email addresses. I remember they were in code, like there were a bunch of ASCII characters like ÄŸφ‡ in the addresses. I also remember some of them were like Blair Witch@ or Fairy Princess@ (forgot the domain name).
Why am I dreaming about this crap? I could care less about MacDonalds and Drew Barrymore and the only frozen meals I eat are frozen Indian entrees from the health food store. I swear, I must have had someone else's dream. Somewhere in this bizarre world of ours, some Hollywood teen is wondering why the heck they dreamt about a dead cat named Vladimir, walking in a weird city with decaying houses in the winter which turns into a summertime nature sanctuary with frogs.
Oh yeah, that reminds me, I remember more. I do remember dreaming of looking in a pond and seeing lots of toads swimming in it. I wanted to dip my feet in it and be with the toads, but the water seemed really dirty. Hey, that's cool....that's more like my dreams.
Drew Barrymore's email addresses? What the...
Posted by Ann @ 09:34 AM CST ..::Link::..
Tuesday, January 22, 2002
Mares eat oats and does eat oats and VERY BAD KITTIES eat ivy
My addiction to houseplants has caused a bit of reshuffling, and I moved my ivies to the living room. But I wondered why they were shrinking. I figured it out...cats LOVE ivy, especially the tender new growth. I don't need this. Earlier this month I fertilized all my plants and practically killed some of them because I guess they were just too young or the pots were too small to be able to handle the fertilizer or something. Some are still in critical condition. So I moved the ivies back to the bedroom where the cats won't be able to munch on them for a nighttime snack when we're not around, and replaced them with a cactus in their former spot. Munch on that, cats.
Posted by Ann @ 03:42 PM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM
It must have been in the early 80s because I think I was going to college and living with my parents. My dad put out some sort of hideous right-to-life display on the front lawn using a red wagon surrounded by rocks...some sort of Roe v. Wade protest sign or something (this dream must have been influenced by the radio in the background while I was dreaming it because I remember them making mention of the anniversary on the news). I was so incredibly embarrassed that he did this and that I would be associated with his political views because I happened to live there, so I told him I was moving out.
Posted by Ann @ 09:53 AM CST ..::Link::..
Monday, January 21, 2002
Annwords for the day
astigmagic: A happy accident the result of bad eyesite, for example, Monet's Water Lilies, or words that astigmatic and long-fingernail typo-prone people like myself make (like, "astigmagic.")
vococolization: Another example of an astigmagic typographic mishap, vococolizations are the snooty "Ewwww"s and "Ohhhh"s made by actors playing fops from the Rococo period.
mishpa: a mishap caused by a typographic error.
Posted by Ann @ 12:44 PM CST ..::Link::..
Uhhhhh..
Does anyone know why there is no such html entity for making a schwa? (Is there anyone out there reading this who knows what a schwa is?) I mean with the schwa so popular a vocalization in American culture lately, you'd think they'd have a key combination--like &schwa;--available. I checked my O'Reily "HTML: The Definitive Guide" and my BBEdit HTML Entity floating palette...no schwa. Bummer.
Posted by Ann @ 12:26 PM CST ..::Link::..
What's in a name...or Gender?
I don't talk about my clients here because it's no one's business, but this isn't anything bad...it's just a weird little coincidence, sort of neat. I have two customers who have the same name (first and last...spelled exactly the same!), but they're different people (they live in different countries). Recently, they bought the same thing on the same day. Makes you wonder what's in a name!
Sometimes I feel that I'm more connected to people with "S" last names; I'm even married to one. Remember when in school teachers would assign you seats alphabetically? So all the kids with last names at the end of the alphabet would end up socializing and making friends with other kids at the end of the alphabet. I swear, in 9th grade, I got along best with the kids with "W" last names because I sat near them. My two best friends (other than Stan) have "S" last names. And it seemed like in school, the kids with the names at the beginning of the alphabet always seemed more popular or successful. Very odd.
Stan and I were discussing our names the other day, and how we wished we'd been named with our middle names as our first names and our first names as our middle names. I'd be Elizabeth Ann and he'd be Lewis Stanley. We even contemplated switching now...(at 40!), but thought it would be too difficult to adjust as we'd be calling eachother by our "new" names and we wouldn't respond.
OK, regarding my pathetic attempt to watch the Packer game yesterday...I was all set to make tiles, but this marble cutting board that I work on got stuck to the wood table because Stan put caulking on the back of it to pad it, so I spent a good time trying to pry the marble cutting board off the wood table (a nifty oblong pale maple retro coffee table with 50's-ish wire legs I got at Rubin's [famous Madison furniture emporium]), worrying that the caulking has permanently ruined it. I'm in tears practically, using a knife to sever the bond. Well, I finally got it off and the caulking caused no damage whatsoever, but my knife scratched the surface, so that left me too depressed to want to continue, so I just surfed the net on the iBook instead. And you do realize that the Packers lost because I watched, don't you? It happens every time. I really should rent my services out to opposing team fans...they could use me as an anti-mascot or something when their team plays the Packers. They pay me, I watch the game, the Packers lose, they make money on their little office bets, I make money, everybody happy (except the rest of Wisconsin who would probably want to lynch me).
Stan's car wouldn't start at work last night, so he got a ride home from a helpful co-worker who just happened to be female. Now I could care less, but the (male) idjits he works with are so unevolved. I know they'll tease him about it because there's this *other* female at his job that he is friends with and they have to tease him about her too. It's just so incredibly moronic. A man can't be friends with a woman at his job without people thinking they're *involved*?" They ask him questions like "Does Ann know about Johanna?" Um, yeah, I know about her. So what? They have a lot to talk to about their family backgrounds (either she or her mom came over from Germany...similar to his biological dad, and Stan is very interested in this right now). They discuss German culture, Nazi attrocities, hardly "flirty, cheat-on-yer-significant-other" material (she has a boyfriend). He'd like me to meet her too. I'm glad that Stan has someone interesting to talk to at his job, and most of them are female. There's also a woman who is a Buddhist nun from Taiwan who he's been having good conversations with too, but I guess they don't tease him about her because, well, she's a nun. But gimme a break. I'm not jealous...why would I be? It's just too bad that some men are still living in another era...what's fascinating is that women actually go for this sub-species...I sure can't figure it out.
Posted by Ann @ 10:22 AM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM
WHAT a WEIRD dream. For some unknown reason, Stan and I decided to go to some sort of arcade...like one of those awful places in a mall or a Chucky Cheese or something. (We NEVER go to places like that) The weird thing was, when we entered the place, it looked sort of vacant and run down...there were no games in view...the place looked practically abandonned and in poor shape. Someone at the counter asked us what sort of game we wanted to play. We told them we were new and didn't know, and asked what did they have available. The guys showed us a map of the place or something, and I chose one game and Stan chose another. They took us to where we were to play, and showed us where Stan would be playing. It was like an aisle at Stein's (huge greenhouse in Milwaukee/Racine area) with movable partitions separating it from other "gaming areas." There were some plants around, some furniture and boxes, and some very bad pictures on the end of the far wall. There was an employee straightening out the place, moving some of the plants around. As he moved the plants, some branches fell off and he said we could take the branches. The point of the "game" was to clean up the place and Stan would score points. I thought this most odd, but Stan got to work. I didn't even go play my game, I just stayed and watched Stan. I was surprised Stan was actually cleaning...he seemed to be doing quite a good job. I told him that this looks just like a way for people to do the dirty work for the employees while they call it a "game." After about 20 minutes or so, the first employee came back and told us our time was up. He said that Stan did a pretty good job. Then he pulled out a score sheet and starting adding up scores for what Stan did. I notice that there were all these codes that he was writing down, like job codes that one has to fill out on a time sheet. I noticed that he was giving me negative scores, and I explained to him that I'd never done this before and I didn't know what to do. I was sitting down on a bean bag chair while this guy was figuring out our scores and there were these older people (late 50s...60s) who came by and were wanting a tour of the place. They started watching what we were doing, getting in our face, and generally annoying us. One woman even got in my face literally, as she bent over to look at a the enamel cat pin on my jacket...it was like she sniffed it...weird.
Posted by Ann @ 08:56 AM CST ..::Link::..
Sunday, January 20, 2002
I'm not at all saddened...
...the show was over when Mulder left.
Posted by Ann @ 02:47 PM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM remembered part II
Now I'm remembering even MORE of my dream. I was dreaming of web pages I designed, but they looked like multi-colored file folders and they were 3-dimensional, and they had slots on the side near the scrollbar area which was the default manilla interior color of the file folder or web browser and I was thinking that I needed to code it so they wouldn't be that color.
Hmmm...I did have a lot of TEA--Lemon Grass--to drink before I went to bed last night...maybe it makes one hallucinate as well as lose IQ test points!
Posted by Ann @ 02:31 PM CST ..::Link::..
Nicolas...
Stop drinking the tea NOW! Although 142 is nothing to sneeze at....one of those online iq tests gave me a 143 and it literally blew me away because I thought I was a lot dumber.
And somehow I knew you'd be a cat!
Posted by Ann @ 01:52 PM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM remembered
OK, I remembered some of my dream. I dreamt that the Golden Newts in our aquarium were now three instead of two, and they were the size of Gallapagos Island Iguanas (of course, the aquarium was much bigger too...more like an indoor pool), and they were munching on the little Eastern Newts that were now the size of Golden Newts. I was grasping the head/jaw of the oversized newt, trying to shake its lunch out of its mouth, but I think the Eastern Newt was a gonner. That's a horrible dream! I also dreamt my mom was having trouble with her iMac not working, which is why she hadn't emailed me recently. I was trying to talk to her on the phone and explain it's probably a simple problem, but I think she was just going to chuck the whole system altogether.
So this morning I phoned my mom and her computer is doing fine (she's just lax on keeping up with me) and I fed the newts so they won't get hungry for eachother.
Posted by Ann @ 01:46 PM CST ..::Link::..
Sports
Well, I'm pretty sure I had a dream last night, but I can't remember it now. I just hate that.
I'm contemplating on whether I should watch the Packer game. I haven't watched a single Packer game the entire season. I'm not a football fan, but sometimes I enjoy watching it...heaven only knows why, because I sure don't. I guess it's just sort of an ironic thing, and it does sort of get suspenseful when it's toward the end of the season and the team from your part of the world is getting close to the playoffs. But no football game goes watched non-productively...I'll either be working on my iBook or making tiles (polymer clay)...haven't decided which. Just can't stand mindlessly watching tv without doing something else besides.
Can't wait for the Olympics, though.