Let’s look at how did I do this past year.

A) Post at most five links to something someone else has created/posted/shared per week.

I stuck to that pretty well with the exception of the weeks surrounding the recent presidential election, so I’m comfortable with saying that part was a success.

B) Refrain from any selfie taking unless said selfie is integral to a crafted post.

I don’t think I took any selfies this past year.  Things have been too busy.

C) Vacation posts will be exempt from rule B, but that still doesn’t mean self-editing isn’t important. 

Vacation?!?  I still haven’t even booked my Cayman trip that I talked about two months ago.

D) Make constructive updates: IE I will not post “I hate life and that Darth Vader Wannabe.

Yeah I just don’t do that sort of thing at all.

E) If I find humor or discover something thought provoking out there in that big expansive world, or if I myself create something humorous or thought provoking, I will share it and not expect any of my friends to comment and pat me on the back for my awesomeness.

Yes.

F) Try to encourage friends to do the all of the above

Here is where I failed!

So I’m upping the ante:  that’s right.  If you post something that is clickbait, false news, a random cooking recipe and you do not provide any explanatory information such as this is something you cooked last night and my was it tasty, or that you do not agree with said policies regarding lack of maternity/paternity, and I see said post, I’m going to call you on it.  If you share an image or movie of some sort, same deal.

If you post something about your life though–great!

And I’m going to encourage like minded people to do the same.  Sitting back and letting friends post what amounts to digital garbage is just not useful.   With such a craptastically fascist political and social landscape in front of us for the foreseeable future, no one should get a pass to bury their head in the sand.

Side note for those completely unaware that you can do this:
I use my own algorithm for FB. You can create one for yourself in about 2min. Just make a custom list, toss all your friends on to it and then use that when you want to read what is going on with people. Plus side: far far fewer ads and you actually see posts from ALL your friends, not just the most traffic’d. Minus side: you see ALL the posts from you friends.

I started writing this post on Facebook as a quick update but then it just took on a life of its own. It’s a great little capsule of what daily life is like at Purgatory.

This morning I awoke with god awful cramps, took advil, soaked in the hot tub until I felt human, got dressed, checked the mouse trap and low and behold I had caught the newest invader who yesterday gave me quite a fright as I was searching for my mousemitt that I thought I had dropped it while walking the property with the tree service guy.

I should probably back up a bit: see we have to get some trees moved in preparation for the great wall project and this guy was recommended by the engineers. I retraced all my steps, even out to the stables (which last weekend and this is having the roof rebuilt/repaired but that will all be posted about on Purgatory).

By now you’re wondering what a mousemitt is: it’s basically a small glove like thing with padding that protects the underside of the wrist and thus prevents RSI/Carpal Tunnel issues. Having had such issues/pain in the past, I cannot say enough good things about them. (If you want to try them out yourself, hit up mousemitt.com.)

Anyway, the upshot of walking all over the property a second time is that I failed to find the missing mousemitt. So, there I was standing in my office casting about trying to think where else had I been; I popped my head into my booth (for those unaware I have a large 4’x6′ sound booth in one corner of my office) and while I didn’t see a mousemitt I did find one of my little plush animals on the floor of the booth. I thought, “well that’s odd” as yesterday that very same animal (a small purple unicorn) had been on the floor again. I have a few such stuffed toys in my booth as sometimes having them about is helpful to divert my focus/energy when performing. They sit in a little thing I made years ago out of an IKEA A-Frame wine rack.

So I put the little unicorn back in his little slot still thinking “well that’s odd, this guy was on the floor as well yesterday when I walked in here .” I then wiggled the frame about and then I pulled it from the wall and looked behind it. I gave a loud,short scream of surprise as sitting there on the wall was…a mouse. Now we don’t have deer mice (I was confused about that last week) but instead we have California Mice. They normally live outdoors, but the lure of free bird kibble means we occasionally have one scurrying about the house. They are territorial so we usually have just one and last week we thought we had caught that one. We emptied the humane trap it was in out by the stables, but there’s a good chance the little guy/girl found its way back. Side note: these guys are incredibly cute and when they run they bound about with a series of hopping movements that make them look like bouncing fluff balls.

In my booth there is a hole for an air vent that has a small fan attached, as during long recording periods it can get a bit warm. Of course said mouse made a b-line for the hole and was in vent. Rather than freak him/her out, I got a humane trap from the kitchen and just poked it into the vent hole. In the pic to the left you will see the vent hole up near the ceiling of the booth.& Then I returned to my desk and what did I find on the floor camouflaged by the dark rug underneath it….the missing mouse mitt of course.

Fast forward to this morning and here’s a shot of the invader before I released it.

I used a Sharpie to mark its tail prior to release and if it shows up in the house again we’ll have to take it farther away–like say up the well tank–to release it. As we realize that just like the feral cats, we now live in the country and we’re going to have live mice and bugs and spiders and snakes plus the occasional dead critter to deal with. While we could shoot, trap-to-kill and wreak other deaths upon the lifeforms here, we are trying to find harmony. It’s just not sanitary for a mouse to be sniffing about the bird cages plus it pisses the boys off no end. Then there is the matter of the food stashing–in the last six months I’ve found stashes in my desk drawers, file cabinets, behind books and even inside my sewing machine. They seem to just love the Harrisons Bird Food the boys eat–as do the wild birds–as any stashes I find I don’t toss in the garbage but instead toss outside so the natives can have a free snack.

So that is a pretty typical morning at Purgatory minus the whole waking up with awful cramps. But hey, I’m a girl…that happens. The rest of the morning was spent working on some web posts (like this one) calling contractors to come clean the crawl space under the house and ordering a few more of those humane mouse traps off Amazon. Then it was time for the daily chores: cleaning the kitchen, feeding the boys, tossing in a load of laundry (we only usually do one load a day since we’re on a septic system), answering emails and doing some work for my father’s company. Later today I have a list of things I want to get done, but like most lists I might get to 2 of the 20 things on it as something will happen to distract me…like a bird will hit my window and be too stunned to fend for itself. (Although sometimes they break their necks and die.)

That is a common thing here as we have a lot of windows–28 individual casements (not counting the exterior transom windows in two of the bathrooms) plus 6 sliding glass doors. To make that number even more insane….the north wing of the house has transom windows throughout the interior. Thankfully no birds collide with those although sometimes Tenar likes to get himself stuck in one.

And with all this window talk I failed to mention all the glass paned doors we have…There are 6 if you count the french doors that separate the north wing from the rest of the house. We have in fact almost no “normal” doors in this place–most of the others are either pocket doors or accordions and only the closets in AS’s office and the recently remodeled guest bath have “solid” doors and I must say compared with the rest of the ones in the house they feel kind of…meh and hollow. Thy agrees…

Oh and to make that window number even more insane…I did’t count the windowed front doors or secondary kitchen door, the skylights, or anything in the Studio building. At some point I need to start the window cleaning cycle back up, but of late there have been so many other things to try to get done….

Here are some more shots of my booth:

At the beginning of June I loaded the truck up with various bits and drove to L.A.  I picked my father up at LAX and then it was off the Anaheim Hilton for the Reliant food show.  We set the booth up that night, and the next day we spent handing out samples to all the Reliant customers in attendance.

The next day was Sunday and we visited Disneyland. I find it an odd sort of place.  Only the feral mallards are real.

The days actives as closely as we remember:

• Lincoln room during which time we walked around the gallery
• Bathroom Break and no trains running
• Picked up Fastpasses for Space Mountain
• Nemo Submarine ride
• Toon town: Chip-n-Dale house, tiny roller coaster, cab ride
• Hot pretzels and drinks
• Castle with band/characters out front.
• Sleeping Beauty’s castle
• Space Mountain
• Walk through Fantasy Land and on to Frontier Land
• Bear Jamboree closed/Gone—father very sad.
• Lunch at French Cafe
• Haunted Mansion
• Pirate Ride
• Jungle cruise
• Tiki Room
• Main Street–ice cream and popcorn
• Walk through Fantasy and Frontier to Cafe Orleans—food was meh
• Parasol and gifts for Mum
• Fireworks seen from hotel room

Then Monday morning it was up bright and early to get the parental unit up to LAX (yeah for carpool lanes) and then the long slog back north.

The title of this post should really be do not;trust your data to Skype. I was so naive when I started my little journey into support hell as I actually thought my issue would be resolved. I thought my data was marginally protected and maintained. Oh how wrong I was.

To back up tiny bit before I inundate you with the gory details, Skype is a service that allows people to make phone and video calls no matter what sort of device they use: be it a traditional phone on the PSTN networks, a personal computer or their cell phone. Skype maintains a database with some pretty personal information and they charge for many of their premium services so they have financial information on their users as well. We know they’ve been in bed with the NSA for years thanks to the documents released by Snowden, and Skype, as of 2011, is owned by Microsoft.

On with the saga: a few weeks back I wanted to get Skype running on a new machine, but because Skype doesn’t use a normal username/password framework that allows storing said information in OS X’s Keychain management system, I can’t just retrieve my password from said app and be done with it.

I went to the Skype site to try to reset my passwd: now because ONE computer I own can actually login to the Skype App, I can actually login to my Skype profile, but I cannot change the password without knowing the password. I tried to do the “put in your email address here and we’ll send you the steps to reset your password” step.

This is what I got.

skype@ is a simple alias that routes to one of my email accounts which is then listed as my second acct with Skype. It too has the same issue.

Did you know in order to contact Skype for support about an issue like this you have to fill out this form on the left with questions like: “When were you born?“ “Give us some of the numbers on the CC you used when you created your account,” and “Provide five people on your contacts list.” Needless to say the first time I had to fill out the form I was angered by the process. I just wanted my password reset.

Having parrots means you never know what thing they will fixate upon and try to destroy.  While I’m lucky in that neither Tenar or Thy are particular destructive sometimes they do go a bit crazy.

A few months ago, Tenar decided to eat the seam of one of my fuzzy socks.

Thankfully I have a sewing machine and I know how to use it.  Here’s are the hasty before and after shots.

Thirty years ago today my grandmother went outside to use up the last few shots on a roll of film.

a bird just wants some more mum time.  Of course if this mean walking halfway through the house, opening two doors, scaling a bed and then sitting on mum’s chest, even better.

As the New Year approaches and I try to clean up my to-do list of all the not quite done stuff, I noticed that yesterday FB suddenly became more interesting.  People stopped reposting so much random crap and click-bait Instead they were generating their own content.  It was very pleasant and I think we need more of this.  To that end, my “NY Resolutions” will be to limit the amount of crap content sharing I do and to increase the amount of meaningful content I create.

I will thus make it my habit to:

A) Post at most five links to something someone else has created/posted/shared per week.

B) Refrain from any selfie taking unless said selfie is integral to a crafted post* (i.e. I will write a short description of why I am posting this image.  Is it a shot of Agent Smith and I riding on a tractor?  I will tell you why we’re on the tractor and include any other pertinent details.)

C) Vacation posts will be exempt from rule B, but that still doesn’t mean self-editing isn’t important. Thus only ONE picture of me holding a giant octopus/space alien/dangerously sharp instrument of torture/etc will be posted.

D) Make constructive updates: IE I will not post “I hate life and that Darth Vader Wannabe”.  I will instead include a short description of whats going on in life and thus avoid the whole passive/aggressive attention seeking ploy which is only resolved after 5 people comment/ask what is going on before I finally respond.  (Of course if I have been posting regular about job  interviews and one morning I make a short post that “I can hardly contain myself!” friends will understand, but that’s because context already exists.)

E) If I find humor or discover something thought provoking out there in that big expansive world, or if I myself create something humorous or thought provoking, I will share it and not expect any of my friends to comment and pat me on the back for my awesomeness.

F) Try to encourage friends to do the all of the above as well as let’s face it, the people I really enjoy connecting with on social media are the friends who do more than share boiled cabbage recipes, post the same funny videos that  five other friends just reposted, and take stupid “Which Harry Potter Broomstick are You” quizzes.  I, and I suspect many others, like reading about each other’s lives and trying to connect with far flung friends and acquaintances. So instead of bemoaning the death of hand written letters and the commodification of our personal lives, I will thus accept the state of things and technology in a constructive fashion.

* By crated I mean actually taking a few moments to formulate my thoughts so that any friend/contact reading said post will not have to ask for clarification.

I got some new equipment.  

It replaces the little Apogee that I’ve been using for the last two years.

And when rewiring the booth, I discovered that something had tried to eat a cable.

Yes…that’s a box of compostable waste bags (6 actually) shipped in a box of non-bio-degradable packing peanuts.

If I didn’t have a box where I store any packing peanuts* we get so that I can reuse them when we have something to send out, I’d feel incredibly silly.  As it is, I feel slightly silly.

* I also save bubble wrap and reuse any butcher paper to line the boys’ cages.

The spare bedroom has built in shelves that are original to the house.  Tenar was not amused when I asked him to try out the space.

I do weird crap sometimes.

Case in point, I have a little “floating shelf” I wanted to use to hold a speaker for my keyboard, only the speaker is a bit too big.  Enter my old O’Reilly Sendmail book and wa’la…perfection.

Just don’t tell Claus.

During which time I managed to blow up this site.  Thanks to having a backup of things though, I managed to piece things back together.

I’ve also been busy managing Purgatory.  Things have been very busy over there, but I’m pleased to note I’m finally getting my personal site back in order.

If you aren’t reading the updates over at purgatory.org, my life has been totally consumed by the work required to get our new house ready for move-in.  So much work has been done, but so much more work still needs to be completed.

In one week’s time the movers will arrive and I will leave my little house in San Francisco for the big ranch in San Jose.  I will be sad to go and I will miss visiting with the neighbors at the daily mornings coffee time (we are next to a cafe) and the fruit trees in our upper garden, but a new adventure of extreme proportions awaits.

Yeah, I have a website again.  Boo no real content has been moved here yet.  I’ll be working on that bit next.

In case you were wondering, purgatory.org is back up too, but now stega.org is my personal site and purgatory.org is setup for our home.

Edit:  4/15/19
Well that was a few years ago:  now the blog is here at networkgirl.  Yeah!