LittleOddMe's blog

This is just a placeholder for my old blog, from when Vox disappeared.

Please go to my new blog at http://littleoddme.user.livecloud.com/

Multiply?

When I found vox (thanks LightChaser) I was also considering Multiply.com.

The reason is, it has multiple levels of privacy, which is what I love about vox.

I went back tonight and tried to log in - they won't recognize me as a member. Fair enough - it's been years. But they won't let me sign up as littleoddme, either. That username is taken. Pricks.

I've written to customer service. I got majorly spammed there, so I don't think I'll like it. But my privacy levels are important to me.

Guardian of the Saddles

Kippy Longsnoutling

Album Meme

Saw this when Tom gave it a shot, and thought I'd give it a go as well:

 

The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. List records in no particular order.

 

Marillion: Misplaced Childhood. I first heard this album in 2000, and it blew me away. The title line in the song just grabbed me and has never let me go: "The childhood, a misplaced childhood, the childhood... oh please, give it back to me!" Of course, this one comes to mind because Tom just posted it.

Suicidal Tendencies: The Art of Rebellion. These guys earn the distinction of being one of only two bands I've paid to go see live. And yes, I was rather angst-ridden in the '90s. Just looking at the album art has me wanting to listen to a song or two today. My poor Love is going to suffer. :P

Ani Difranco: Little Plastic Castle. My friend Bek introduced me to this album in 1998... holy carp this woman just blew me away. I am a sucker for clever lyrics, and she plays such a mean guitar. There's just an incredible brutal joyous amount of life in this album.

Rush - Roll The Bones. Amazingly I didn't hear Rush (consciously) until 2005.

Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes. I heard this one when it was getting radio play. One of the few albums I actually discovered when most other people did.

Indigo Girls - Swamp Ophelia. Another one Bek introduced me to. I can't get through "Touch Me Fall" without missing her intensely.

Melissa Etheridge - Brave and Crazy. Ohhh, this brings me back to my first real love of my life. Claude worked manning the phones of a night time business. Business wasn't great, and whenever the call volume was down, we'd go down the hall and lay on the carpet of an empty office with one headphone each, and listen to Melissa Etheridge and Sinead O'Connor. This album always takes me back to the days when love was so simple.

Sinead O'Connor - I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, and Faith and Courage. The first album .... well, see above. I bought all her albums up until Faith and Courage (and then moved 10,000 miles and left all my albums behind, so haven't collected more). They're quite different albums, but I love her voice and seeing her progression as an artist. And yes, I love her general angst.

Bruce Springsteen - Born in the USA. I bought this when I was sixteen, and had to sneak it into the house because my mother thought that music with drums in it was of the devil. All I wanted to do was to belong a little - to understand the music other kids were listening to. I didn't know where to start, so this album was an impulse buy because of the cover, and a delicious little secret that I listened to on headphones under my covers at night. This album symbolizes the beginning of a long road for me towards freedom of belief.

The Whitlams - Eternal Nightcap. Another Bek album. Gosh, I adore these guys. My favorite song isn't on this album, but it's my favorite overall. They're a fantastic Aussie band.

Suzanne Vega - 99.9F. Another artist intro'd by Claude, but I was long past that relationship when I got this album. I guess a lot of the themes really settled deeply with me.

Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms. 1995. I was hanging out on a verandah in Cairns on a wet season afternoon, watching the storms roll in from the sea and getting stoned for the very first time in my life.

Stealing Beauty Soundtrack - my best buddy since high school introduced me to this movie the first time we lived together. I love a lot of the songs on this album.

John Butler Trio - Sunrise Over Sea. Another Shane album, from the last time we shared a house.

 

 

God, that was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Happy fox dance!

The first day I saw the whole fox family, they were ambling across our back yard. I was in the middle of opening our back screen door, and there was a mad scramble of foxy feet as they all darted for the cover of the lantana.

I counted five of them - three kits plus the parents. I've since revised that down to a family of four, as I have regularly seen four of them, but never seen more than five (and of course that was a mad scramble).

Tonight I had given up on photography. The long shadows had already taken over all of the back lawn area, and the best shots require at least some patches of sunlight. I was wandering out to the kitchen while chatting on the phone with Myshelle... and....

O.M.G.

We had FIVE foxes on our back lawn.

The light was terrible, but here you have the photographic evidence, in grainy black and white:

And then there were five!!

I'm so excited. That's Papa fox with his tail outstretched, larger than the others. He's the one I photographed barking at me as he marked his territory around the woods. Mama fox is the little on on the front on the other side, the one with the most wary look. She's very wild and skittish, as she should be.

The baby in the very front looking right at the camera is the one I've called Beebee, for Bold Baby. She's always the first to come out and see what scraps we've left out for them. I had thought of a name for the other kit, but now that it might have been two separate kits I will have to wait and see if I can discern which is which. You can bet the next few evenings I am going to be out there searching the kits for minute differences in coat patterns etc, to try and tell who is who.

And thank you Myshelle for being such a patient and understanding friend, for going from full swing of telling me all your good news, to "do you need to go grab your camera? Ok, bye!" in about five seconds flat. You rock. :D

Blame it all on Allie Brosh

I've had the strangest time this last week. Something is just off. I was so exhausted when I woke up yesterday morning, I called in sick for work and went back to sleep for another two hours. Well ok, there was other stuff going on, but it's the kind of GI stuff I have only had in the past when I've been working rotating shifts or some such.

I woke up for a few hours, slept another few. I thought "oh well at least I'll wake up nice and early in the morning and get my exercise in before I go to work." Nope - I got a full eight hours and forty five minutes of sleep. I am finally feeling rested, but I wonder what's going on? Surely it can't be just the amount I am working, but I guess we are also so short staffed at work, I am working pretty darned hard. I only sat down (other than to answer phone calls or to counsel someone, after which I was right up again, so it's hardly a rest) .... for fifteen minutes today. Otherwise I was just working my butt off. Yes, that must be why I feel the need to spend every minute away from work sleeping.

Or...has someone been releasing Tsetse flies into my house while I'm not looking? Hmmmm.

Anyhow, I spent the day extremely productively. I played lots of Age of Empires, slept (of course), avoided housework so deftly I should join the olympic team for Housework Avoidance (if it's not a sport it should be).... and I read the entire hyperbole-and-a-half diary by Allie Brosh.

So, since it was my choice to read it I should really blame myself for the sheer weirdness of the dreams I had last night. I'm not going to, though. I keep peering at Allie's self-portraits, and I'm sure I can discern a faint trace of the word "scapegoat" lightly tattoed into her forehead.

So ... Allie, this is all your fault:

In my dream I switched back and forth from flying (in planes) to boating. I managed to make an interminable international flight (of which I was conscious of every agonizing second of annoying stinky fellow passengers and vomitous children). Thanks, brain, for your incredible ability to stretch consciousness of sixteen hours of time into .... oh, about three seconds, leaving yourself plenty of time to torture me for the rest of the night. I managed to get involved in plane acrobatics in remote amazon communities that just happened to be untouched by the superhighway we just flew under (under!!!!!) a few miles upstream. I could understand everything everyone there was saying to me, but I can't remember any of it.

By that time we were in a small plane, and I was filming out the front of the window, thinking how weird it would be to film my way through a plane crash and have someone find it later. So then we crashed of course, and I was the only one who walked away. I would have mourned my fellow fliers, but I couldn't remember who they were, and besides I was snorkelling with sea lions on the edge of a california reef by then, while listening in my earphones to a lecture about how dangerous it was to snorkel with sea lions.

I can't quite remember the next bit. Some conspiracy against someone I loved... we had to go hide the boat in a disused warehouse. I came out again and was at the base of a narrow canyon road that wound up into the rocky mountains. Allie Brosh had already built a Town Center there. Holy heck, I thought, she's already advanced to the Castle Age, and I haven't even started the game. Her color was green. I was blue, because the player is always blue, then there was some purple guy who was already at the Imperial Age and was hell bent on trashing Allie. She suggested we band together to whup his ass, and gave me some resources for me to zip through the Feudal age to the Castle Age. By this time, all my established buildings were mixed among hers. Then I noticed something - she was strategically building castles to take out all of my buildings!! She was just using me to help her whup the Purple Guy's ass, then she was going to click the "enemy" button and sit back while her castles destroyed me. The evil bitch - after everything I had done for her! I guess that's what you get for siding with someone who has olympic aspirations. There Can Be Only One!

So, forgetting that she'd both saved and spared my ass in the first place, I decided to sneak out a troop of peasants into the mountainside and mine stone. I pretended I couldn't see what Allie was doing, and strategically built castles of my own (but not enough to worry her) and secret stashes of troops in the surrounding hills that could come down and take out all of her stuff.

This dream went for hours. I wake up a lot of times a night, and each time I'd go back into the dream. The Age of Empires game seemed to last even longer than the international flight had. In the end I didn't get to see what happened between me and Allie.

I woke up with only an hour to spare to get ready for work, and I wasted twenty minutes of that writing down the stupid dream rather than going back to sleep and seeing who won the bloody game!!

I'm glad I didn't destroy her though. Her blog is utterly hysterical and I'd miss it if my hidden soldiers had killed her. In retrospect, I should have hidden them down in her meth cellar. She'd never have thought to look for them there.

Some of my favorite entries from Hyperbole and a Half:

Sneaky Hate Spiral - definitely my favorite. This should be on a poster in my workplace. I'll have to go check in Allie's shop to see if it is a poster. I would definitely buy a poster.

 How A Fish Almost Destroyed My Childhood

 The Alot is Better Than You at Everything

.... and many more. These were just the easiest to pull out of it all... and are definitely some of the highlights. Besides I am too fricking tired to search through for more (despite having had a two hour nap since leaving work tonight).

Just. One. More. Work. Day. I think that first I need to print out her entry rating her uterus. I am sure it will go down well in my all-female workplace. :P

P.S. A huge thanks to LeendaDLL for introducing me to Hyperbole-And-A-Half in the first place. In which case, it's actually all your fault. :D

And yet more foxes....

In for a drink

I set up a little blind on our back porch this afternoon. I've hung out there a lot this week after work, but usually the light isn't great by the time I get out there. Unfortunately we live on the eastern slope of a hill, so we lose the light early, and most of my fox shots so far have been in the shadows.

Nyah nyah

However, I've been putting out our vegetable scraps and such for the foxes and other critters, now that we're heading for fall. That, combined with the water dish I put out for them, means that we're the first port of call for the foxes when they wake up in the late afternoon.

 

Grin

So this afternoon I was out there with my laptop waiting for them to arrive, and researching grey foxes online. Did you know they are the only canines that can actually climb trees? Holy cow, now I have to try and catch one doing that!! Wouldn't that be incredible? Anyhow, for now I only have them firmly on terra firma.

Leaf shadow

 

 

 

 

 

It takes two

 

 

Tiiiiiired but recovering.

I went to bed two hours early last night. Woke up around my usual time, fell asleep half an hour later. Slept an hour and a half. Stayed up a couple of hours, had a three and a half hour nap. Got up for a couple of hours.... slept another hour.

I actually felt awake for a few hours of the late afternoon.

Amazingly, I'm yawning again, and it's not even ten pm. I guess I still need some more. :D

But first, I just finished making net-sized copies of the photos I got earlier on my fox stakeout. So I'll post them first.

Be vewy vewy qwiet

I'm hunting foxeses...

Stakeout

LOMs Qotd: Learning Curve

What's the most interesting class or course you have ever taken?