Inspiring Bloggers

Wendy of Zoom Times has nominated me for the Very Inspiring Blogger award. Thank you!

So I'm supposed to come up with seven things about me you might not know. Hmm. 

1. Despite being of Scandinavian descent and spending 5/6 of my life in the Seattle region, I hate coffee. Don't like the smell. Don't like the taste. (OK, actually I've never tasted straight coffee, but once or twice I've had a taste of mocha-flavored things and they are nasty.) Since I also hate all carbonated beverages and pretty much any sweetened beverages, I made it all the way through law school and graduated with honors without the influence of caffeine.

2. I did get a caffeine IV once, though. It was supposed to be a treatment for a spinal headache after Deux was born. It didn't help the headache, but it sure did keep me awake all night, something I didn't exactly appreciate what with having a newborn and all.

3. I suffered from chronic fatigue/fibromyalgia/or something like that through most of my teen years (13-15 and 18-20). The first time I spent a lot of time reading, got very bored with novels, and got sucked into books about government, economics and law. This led to me deciding to enter law school, which is what I was doing when the second round hit, so I already had plenty to read. 

4. However, I pretty much quit doing any other kind of school at 13, so I call myself a junior high dropout. Fortunately I had, thanks to His Majesty's encouragement, already gotten through most of high school math. I do wish I'd done more science, but it's never too late to learn and I at least enjoy reading about it now.

5. Even though I am very thankful to have been fairly healthy (allowing for pregnancies) for the past fifteen years, I do still get bouts of insomnia. However, they don't worry me anymore. It's just a great chance to lie awake and compose blog posts.

6. Also when I was a teenager, I used to cook breakfast every morning for my grandmother (His Majesty's mother), when she lived in a trailer on our farm. She had the same four or five menus she rotated through in the same way every single morning for several years. I still got it wrong every time. Fortunately she was patient. Now I do the same thing to DOB. He is patient because he knows what's good for him.

7. Whenever I have a list of seven things to complete, I always run out of ideas before I get to number seven. But maybe you knew that.

Now I'm supposed to nominate some other bloggers, and I can't nominate Wendy since she nominated me, even though I find her science classes and her children's invented holidays highly inspiring.

Also, I can't nominate Ordo Amoris, which was one of my favorite inspiring blogs ever and just recently went offline. :-(

So here are a few others, by no means comprehensive.

Dewey's Treehouse: Education, cheap menus, and imaginary squirrels. 

Afterthoughts: School plans, great linkage, and goats. (OK, confession, I have zero interest in goats. Maybe if they were imaginary.)

Semicolon: If I ever need to know what's good among what's new at the library, especially in the children's and YA section, Semicolon is the place to go.

And while we're on the topic of bloggers who inspire me to read more (like I need that), Diary of an Autodidact has just indexed all of his book reviews, and Carrie at Reading to Know has finally gotten hooked on  Harry Potter.

The Jones Home: Which inspires me to spend more time at creeks and laugh.

It's time for a post

Because if I don't post, then all the posts I thought-about-but-didn't-make pile up deeper, and get muddled together, like the papers on my desk, and the bookcase, and the other bookcase, and the pictures of epic battles of merfolk get muddled up with the natural gas statement and the traffic ticket (ouch) and a rough draft of a map for the next role-playing adventure.

And then I never get around to recording the way the oven thermometer that exploded and destroyed the roast chicken, or how much I love spring coming because the ducklings play outside after supper--even in the rain--instead of jumping on the couches, or my mixed feelings about having work or not having work, or my brilliant insights on an issue I have since forgotten (that one must have sifted off onto the floor and gotten thrown away).

So now I have posted and we can think of it as a clear slate and the next time something drifts through my brain I can actually post about it instead of about not posting.

Now if I could just do the same for my desk.

The New Blog Look

Do you like it? Is it crunchable, precious? Is it tasssty?

Or is it too orange? Is the photo too much of a contrast in color? (I tried it with a blue background, which went well with the water but was just wrong.) Can I get some kind of recognition in bravery for putting a picture from an unflattering angle as my cover photo?

One awesome thing about the upgraded templates is that now, when there is only one comment, it says "1 comment" and not "1 comments," which always made me want to go and add an extra comment, even if I had nothing to say, just to make the number agree.

Mostly I wanted the labels cluster and the hierarchical post history, because the main reason I keep this blog is so that I can look back over my life, most of which I have already forgotten, and my past life on the blog was getting too long. Now I can see how my posting has dropped off over the years. It took a major hit when we moved. It seems to be trending upwards again, though. Perhaps I shall do better this year.

But I'm not making any promises.

Renaming

So from the time the Ducklings first began making their appearances, we have operated on a simple numbering system: D1, D2, D3, D4. (This confuses people sometimes--no, no of their real life names start with D.)

This worked for a collection of very small people with as-yet unexpressed personalities, saying assorted random cute things. However, those days are fading, personalities are very much expressed, and it seems like it's time to have real Names. Besides, sooner or later they'll be beyond being called "Ducklings."

But to make it simpler, we'll stick with the letter D. So, presenting the Ducklings:

D1 will now be known as the Duchess, for her commanding presence and royal bearing. And because "Princess" doesn't start with a D.

D2 will be known as Deux, because he is the second born and DOB Jr. (in name and personality)

D3 will be known as Dot, for her reflective and observational qualities.

D4 will be known as Dash, for his speed and energy.

I am, as always the Queen of Carrots, and DOB remains the Duke of Burgundy.

Left to right: Dash, Deux, Dot, Duchess.

Got it?

Spam, Spam, Spam

I've been getting a lot of comment spam lately, so I've turned off anonymous comments. If you have a problem with this, I'm not sure what you should do about it. Cry, perhaps.

Just what I need

Another blog! And a big new project! I can't help myself. I like big new projects. And new blogs.

Anyway, the time seems to have come to start taking seriously the prospect of growing food in our backyard. It saves money. It's educational. It gives us all something to do outside. It's fun. My Garden Grows will document our garden plans, problems, and produce, along with efforts to identify the plants in our backyard, book reviews of garden-related books, and whatever else seems to fit.

By the way, I'm getting addicted to Wordpress as a blog host. Who knew you could do all that stuff so easily? I hate changing addresses, though. Sigh.

To Each His Own . . . Nightmare

Last night I dreamed I had put up a couple of posts on the blog criticizing something. A few hours later, I realized they were full of bad writing and bad logic. I rushed back to the computer to edit them to what I really meant to say, only to find out that people had already read and replied ripping my original posts to shreds. Then I felt dishonest about editing them.

Readability

When this test was first going around, I suppressed my results in embarrassment. Then I read one person who had tested a blog of C. S. Lewis' writings and found that it was at the elementary level, and one of Chesterton's was at the high school level. (Chesterton himself said that if you could not say what you meant in words of one syllable, you didn't really know what you meant. Though he did not so restrict himself in his own writings.)

So why be ashamed of being readable? Why hang my head when I have merely realized the goal of endless re-readings of The Elements of Style?

I admit with some embarrassment that the deciding factor for me to post my score was coming across a poorly-written blog proudly sporting a badge that said it was a "genius" reading level. (Indeed, there are a lot of blogs out there that would require more than a genius to decipher. This does not mean that they took a genius to write.)

So, the Duchy. Clear, direct and readable since 2003.

That or maybe my first thought was correct, and I devote too much of my content to quoting the ducklings.