pokitty.com blog

hello world

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:58:32 +0000

Hi! I'm not dead! Sometimes I go through a cycle of being quiet and largely offline, that's all.

I got badly wound up last night. My dad called while I was out for the evening. I was occupied for the evening and couldn't check my voicemail or call him back just then, although I did sneak a peek at my missed calls list.

It's not like my dad to call at night (usually it's early afternoon). I have an elderly relative and a family friend both going through some medical stuff, one whose condition seems rather bad. So my immediate thought was "oh shit, somebody's in the hospital right?"

I spent an hour getting increasingly agitated before I could get out and check my voicemail. An hour before I could hear my dad's familiar tenor saying he hadn't called in awhile and just wanted to catch up.

It took another ten minutes before I calmed down enough to call him back. That's not an exaggeration. That is ten minutes of me trying to take a deep, even breath but instead sounding like I just got off a treadmill.

Later, after dad and I talked, I burst into tears for no reason at all. Everything was fine, but I was too keyed up to not cry, so cue the waterworks.

If I had simply assumed the missed call was my brother, I could have had a peaceful evening. I would have seen my dad as the missed call only when I could immediately call him back. There would have been no time for my panic to escalate.

I think maybe the moral of the story is that I should slack more. That would have spared me grief. Clearly this putting-forth-effort business can only end in tears. But hey, I got to catch up with my dad, so yay on that!

In other news, I suck at Crazy Taxi. I'm having fun playing anyway.

project progress

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 09:56:53 +0000

A new year is safely underway and the holiday season is (barring a few laggardly get-togethers) over. And there was much rejoicing.

I've made excellent progress on the project I mentioned. I wanted a way to associate a character name with a forum post, without the writer/roleplayer needing a new forum account for each character. I wanted it and I made it happen.

I made it happen.

Sorry for the repetition, but I'm having trouble processing that I actually got this done. I have wanted my little forum to have this feature since 2005 and finally, before 2010 came to close, I got it done. (There are some niceties I want to add, but core functionality is in place with no noted problems.)

This is awesome.

a personal project

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 22:58:35 +0000

I think I've found a cure, or at least a salve, for my burgeoning dissatisfaction.

It's simple. I'm a sort of creative person, but sometimes the creative part of me gets a little burnt out. Trying to force it only makes me miserable. What I need—what I've lacked for too long—is a project where ideas and cooperation take a back seat to getting shit done.

Another aspect of my frustration has to do with roleplay by forum post. Every site has a different CMS. The main site where I play will be moving to a different CMS, but right now we don't even know which CMS that will be. It's all up in the air and making me crazy. Until that gets settled, my own little modded forum will be on hiatus, because I don't want to divide anyone's attention (especially mine) between the sites and CMSes.

But my grumpy mood finally came to a head.

Screw it, I thought. I'm working on my site anyway. I won't try to get any members there until everything else evens out a little, but I need something to do. There is a specific feature lacking from every forum and CMS I try (excepting a phpBB mod that is highly insecure, so DO NOT WANT). I don't want to open my site without that in place and it's the perfect little project.

I estimate there are four main aspects of adding my desired feature. There must be a way to add my special data to the site, to edit it, to delete it, and to use it on forum posts. There are many other niceties that could be added, but these are required before the feature is ready for use.

Today I've been snowed in. I built a control panel for this data. By noon I was able to add rows. By five P.M. I was able to delete data. Editing will probably take as long as those two combined, since I must both access data from the database and write it back, instead of just one or the other. As for using it in posts, I don't know. It might be straightforward to do or it might be unremitting hell.

But I had four goalposts on the project, and I've already met two. I'm a lot more content now than I've been in a long time. In fact, after I get the Christmas tree done, I think I'll have enough pent-up creativity to work on a story post I owe.

I love this.

ice ice baby

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 03:49:25 +0000

It's finally winter here in South Dakota, complete with below-freezing temperatures and icy roads. (Icy pavement, too; I slipped and hit the same knee that's still purple from last month. It's fine, though; the old purple was almost faded and the new impact didn't even swell up!)

Hang on. I'm attempting to ascertain the exact time in my life where I started being happy simply to have a knee that wasn't shaped like a basketball. On second thought, I don't want to know.

Life is good, though. Nothing hurts. My brother from out of state is visiting for the week. I got a baby to smile a face-splitting grin for me, burp for me, and fall asleep on my shoulder. I have a (mostly) warm enough house, warm clothes, hot meals, and even some intensely satisfying video games. Weighing my life against the entire spectrum of human existence, I'm really quite fortunate. I am also really quite unsorry for this post's title. :-D

chocolate pudding

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:13:59 +0000

It's been a hard morning. My thoughts are all disjointed. I keep thinking about my late aunt. She died last year in November.

I miss her. She understood me so well, maybe even better than I understood her. I could show her all my emotional attachment to a book and its heroine, and I never had to fear that she would think it was silly. She loved books, as I do, and children, and animals. She loved to have a cat sitting in her lap.

Today my blog reading list turned up someone's experience with the Little Women film (Winona Ryder version). I had watched that when it was new and caught it again a few months ago. It really brought home how much I miss my aunt. With her, I wouldn't owe any explanation for how much I identified with Jo March and how seeing the movie again was something like a family reunion for me: seeing people whom I knew but had not seen for years, people I loved.

(It is worth noting that I probably own more Louisa May Alcott books than most people own books, period. I have an obsession stemming from finding and loving Little Women when I was just a little girl.)

She would have totally gotten it. We would have compared childhood literary influences and heroines.

My aunt loved chocolate pudding too. Toward the end of her life, her disabilities made it impossible for her to eat it neatly, so when she did have pudding, she ate it as privately as possible and made a merry mess. Because it was chocolate pudding and she loved it.

Ever since she died, whenever the thought occurred, I would glance upward and say or merely think, "Chocolate pudding." Originally it was, "God, you had better have chocolate pudding there for her. Chocolate. Pudding." Over time it got distilled down to the two words and the same insistence.

This morning, before the sun came up, I couldn't sleep for these thoughts swirling. I went to the fridge, got the last cup of chocolate pudding, and ate it in slow contemplation. It's the closest I could come to sharing pudding with her.

I miss her so, so much.

Untitled

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 23:04:26 +0000

Why do I always feel like I'm scrambling to keep up with my life? It's mine; it's not going anywhere without me.

Just over two weeks ago, I tripped on steps and gave myself an epic knee injury. Swelled up like bone-dry sponge held underwater. It's still bright purple, which is a bit worrying. I thought after two weeks it should be yellowing and fading, but it's as purple as grape soda, and becoming more tender to touch instead of less. :( On the bright side, it's no longer swelled up.

Why did I land so hard? Because my DS fell with me and I couldn't let it smash apart, so my knee took the hit instead.

Priorities, people.

I have nothing else to talk about right now.

Flickr integration bugs

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 16:09:09 +0000

I am tired and dissatisfied with everything lately. It colors my experiences.

I tried Tabulas' new Flickr integration and ran into bugs. I wrote up my experience, explaining what happened.

What do I do with it, though?

Support for Tabulas is now directed through Facebook. I've tried to like Facebook, but the more I'm required to do so, the more I want to punt it through a wall. I'm not posting to Facebook about this because FB makes me crazy.

Which appears to mean that the time I spent writing up my problem is time that I have wasted. That sucks. I'm putting it all here on my journal anyway; I don't write nearly enough and I got this much written, so I'm keeping it.

(In which integration does weird things for me.)

This sucks. If I could get Tabulas to re-copy my images, into the correct album this time and linking correctly to their Flickr origin, I'd really like to use this feature. Maybe someday!

missed a month

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 14:22:42 +0000

Evidently I always think August goes by too fast:

Oh sweet cheese, it's September now, isn't it? I could swear it was July just the other day.

I seem to have fallen off the ends of the internet. How did that happen? Also, wasn't it June yesterday?

At least I'm consistent.

what I did this summer, 2010 edition

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:54:10 +0000

Hi! It's been too long since I actually posted anything from inside Tabulas (those weird little title-only posts were from my cell phone), so I'm going to try sum up rather than cover everything.

I thought I would spend the summer being relatively lazy, roleplaying some online, catching up on various projects. That is so far from what actually happened that the two things are in different solar systems. What actually happened was I got signed on to provide part-time child care. And then more child care. And my out-of-town boyfriend moved back to his hometown, which is also where I live, so we saw each other often instead of just weekends.

All this happened before my choir director shanghaied (wait wait, "shanghaied" is how you actually spell that? Really? Well, if you say so, spellcheck - whoa what? "Shanghaied" is a word but "spellcheck" isn't? LOLWUT) - where was I? Ah. She shanghaied me into multiple things and since I have never, ever been mistakable for an organized person, my commitments quickly got away from me.

When I did get a spare moment online, I would stare at Tabulas' compose entry screen. I would go to the most recent entry on my friends page, click on that journal name, then click the feed icon in my browser. The feeds weren't updating since sometime in June (I see they're working now). And I would look at the Facebook "like" buttons all over Tabulas, wondering why it was more important to for me and other users to be able to "like" things on Facebook than to allow our own content to be syndicated into our Facebook Notes. I know that it must have been much easier to add the "like" button than to troubleshoot the reason the feeds weren't updated correctly, but it still cast a pall on my journal keeping.

So the feeds are fixed and here I am, but not before fixing up my Dreamwidth account and preparing to start fresh there. I don't know where that leaves me - if I should stick around Tabulas out of habit or loyalty, or if I should jump ship to Dreamwidth despite having some deep reservations about the way they do things there. Maybe I should journal GeoCities style, one static HTML page at a time. ;) Or a pen and ink journal, scanned in as a gallery of indecipherable images!

I may end up crossposting via email: one copy to directly Dreamwidth, and another through Posterous to Tabulas. It's annoying to have to rejigger everything that way, but until Dreamwidth and Tabulas can crosspost from one to the other, it might be my best bet. Which means figuring out how to format email for both Dreamwith and Posterous. Awesome.

Ah well, if it were simple, I'd be less inclined to try it and I know it. Till later, good readers.

Still alive, just busy and distracted. And happy. <3

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 21:27:15 +0000

Posted via SMS from Ree Posterous