One of our staff members is leaving for another department. They’re having a little party in her honor before she leaves.
The email announcing this was titled “Shonda go away party”.
Somehow that doesn’t convey the warmth and well-wishes that I think were intended…
You’re packing for a week in San Francisco.
What do you pack?
There’s this webpage that lets you upload a picture, then it searches celebrity photos and shows you people you match.
My first try was kind of a dud – a pic taken at work one day, I was sort of scowling and the thing was unable to find matches with greater than 60% compatibility. I was mildly amused to learn that my face in that shot was 49% compatible with Ronald Reagan!
But trying with another shot, in which I was actually smiling, gave me
Which is sort of fun.
G’wan, you know you wanna do it too! Meme time!
I just listened to a decent audiobook version of Anne of Green Gables produced by Librivox recordings. Found it through the iTunes library but was sufficiently curious to go look for the source web page.
And it made me think of
, who has some formal training in audiobook reading and has mentioned trying to do it professionally.
Looks like Librivox publishes readings of works that are no longer under copyright. Readers volunteer to read and then the site collects donations; half of the donation goes to the reader and the other half to site maintenance. Strikes me that it would also be a good way to get a portfolio of work out there – the readers generally identify themselves and their website information at the beginning of each chapter.
Not that I’m aiming for that big of a career change, of course, but it was an interesting thought about whether this is actually a way to break into that business…
Last week was pretty taxing, what with nursing my husband through a nasty cold. Then,
One of my dearest friends lost her grandmother last week, and had to endure the grief and the memorial service and so on… I feel I haven’t been nearly available enough for her and her husband, who I also care about a lot.
Another had a breast biopsy last Tuesday, so I spent the afternoon at the hospital hanging out with her and distracting her from the fears.
Another ended up in ER on Friday morning, with chest pain. He’s out now, fortunately it wasn’t cardiac, but it was certainly disruptive for him, his wife, and his newborn daughter. Have tried to help him sort things out with only limited success.
Another ended up in the ER Friday night coughing up blood – which bought her several days in ICU and she’s still in hospital…I was able to help out a bit Fri night but haven’t been much help since.
Another has been spending every afternoon at the hospice because her mother’s dying of liver failure – which is a particularly unpleasant way to die and there’s all sorts of unhappy family dynamics making it worse. About all I’ve been able to do for her is check in by phone periodically, and she’s holding up OK, but I know she’s having a hard time of it.
Another was in town over the weekend because her mother has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma and is doing very poorly… family stress going on there, too.
Me, I managed to catch a cold midway through this, which has undermined my ability to be as helpful as I otherwise would be. Not to mention the level of support I could’ve given if things would just happen one at a time. As it is, I’m a week behind on work and school deadlines and moving more slowly than I’d like.
So… count this as a general apology to all my friends who need my support, if you feel I haven’t been as good a friend as I ought. I’m aware of it and trying the best I can…
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14635219&ft=1&f=1001
Marcel Marceau has died. Does it make me a horrible person that the first thing that ran through my mind was the famous mime-in-an-invisible-box (coffin) routine?
Apparently someone has deliberately bred a type of cat with dachshund-size legs:
I’m sort of having a problem with this. Dachshunds have so many health problems related to their long back-to-limb ratio. That breed was created for a reason – to hunt in tight spaces – but why would a pet cat need to be bred like that? It seems to add needlessly cruel limitations.
Sorta cute, of course, but is that really a reason to contort nature so?
I just tried a “white nectarine” and … oh, yum! Way more flavorful than any yellow nectarine I’ve had all season. And a nice texture as well.
And I’ve been eating lots of a plum-apricot hybrid fruit that seems to have changed names several times just this summer. First batch I bought, the little sticker on them identified them as “pluots”. Later I saw they’d changed the name to “plumicots” and now this latest batch go by “dinosaur eggs”. Regardless they’re juicy and sweet.
What fruit have y’all found to be particularly savory this season?
Probably actually fairly accurate though I’d have expected to score higher in tech than in math…
Scrappy Blog 