My Life As A Dog

I said, a few posts back that I'd been considering helping my dog blog. Well, I'm doing it. Not instead of this blog, but along with it. She's got her own blog  and it's fun and it's easy. Not only that, but it's really  therapeutic after a day of dealing with  funding cuts and whatnot. I can take a break from human concerns and the Big Picture out there and really contemplate the joy of squirrel chasing.

This post is not meant to promote Lola's blog. In fact, I don't even know if I'm going to blogroll her. So far she won't blogroll me as hers is for animals only. No, this is more along the lines of a confession, because we went fully anthropomorphic on her blog. Yes, she's blogging in the first person and I'm just the ghostwriter. It's a little embarassing because  I'm  normally kind of nauseated by cutesy stuff.  but I have to say that a fair number of blogging dogs out there are anything but cutesy. Quite a few have a pretty acerbic wit.

Of course there are those who argue that anthropomorphism isn't just silly, it's  wrong, wrong, wrong. We must accept our furry, feathered or scaled brethren  for what they are and not try to make them human and all that. Maybe. But where's the fun in that for anyone? Dogs and humans have lived, worked and played side by side for thousands of years. I think we're capable of understanding each other pretty well by now.  Doing things this way has the side effect of making me look at things from what might really be her point of view. The only thing is, I think that all this attention may be going to her head, just a little.

A Giant Leap for Blogger

You can read about it on the Official Google Blog, Blogger Buzz or for the most detail the Blogger in Draft blog. Blogger is introducing Template Designer. I know there are a lot of very iimportant things going on right now, but I have to admit that when I caught the post about this on the Google Blog it took my breath away. Of course there were some mixed feelings. I'd just finished finding a three column template and installing it and customizing it. That was a few days ago, really. And now you can do the same thing with a few clicks of the mouse.

This is why I came back to Blogger after a sojourn at Wordpress. Blogger, like many Google products, will seem to take forever to upgrade features like this. Their template sets had grown so old that they were recommending other sites to find more up to date ones not too long ago. Now, in a very short time they've burst forth with the features bloggers dream about. First they added  pages about month ago. A much valued feature in Wordpress, pages can turn your blog into a whole website if you should want that. And now Template Designer, which lets you choose a more up to date template, and then customize it completely. The best thing about it is the way you can choose one, two or three columns, change that around whenever you want, and rearrange the layout of the columns. All very tricky stuff in CSS and now there's no need to hurt your brain doing it.  You can also change the width of....everything. You can, in fact, have it your way.

So what are you waiting for? Go fool around with this.It'll take your mind off the health care debate and/or  tea baggers for a while. Just save the old template first, just in case.

Things That Suck

This is a short and very incomplete list. Right now what sucks in my little world is changing my template. 3 columns! Just what I always wanted! Mostly to accomodate a nice, long blogroll, with snippets. Oh, yeah! Guess what was the only data that seems to have gotten lost in the transition? Yes, of course. The blogroll. Everything else is there. So if you belong on this blogroll - you know who you are - and I don't get it up there in the next few days, please leave a comment and a link.

Thanks.

Update: Following blogs is a good idea. I've only done that with blogs that have the option on the site which are all on Blogger. Those could be imported right onto the blogroll. It's a start.

OK, So it's been a while.....

What happened, oh, months and months ago, is that I missed a few days too many. It started to seem like there had to be a killer post to come back with and there wasn't one. And the health care debate was depressing the hell out of me. Now it's just begun to seem eternal. But to get away from it all I started reading books again. Novels, no less. Stopped watching much cable news. Had to do it for a while. I was coming home from work, dealing with my husband's considerable health problems and then getting my stomach in knots listening to Ed Schultz bash Obama all over the place.I just needed my personal time to be pure escapism for a while, I guess.

 In the meantime, life here at Casa Yenta has become more and more complicated and less and less blogworthy. Mr. Yenta is having a harder time. We can't much go anywhere or do anything that's likely to be of interest to anyone and a recounting of our days would come across as very whiny. As a matter of fact we don't usually feel terribly whiny about any of it. We're slogging along and coping with what's in front of us as it comes up. It's occurred to me that humans need a certain amount of adversity - which we like to call challenge. If life is going well, we'll  climb a mountain or go to see depressing but intellectual foreign films or do something else that's uncomfortable and somewhat dangerous to our well-being.  If we encounter actual adversity, well, then our normal life becomes sufficiently challenging and our need to seek adventure is satisfied by just getting through the week. It's not such a bad system, really.

That said, the latter doesn't make for compelling blogging, does it? Not really. I do still love blogging and blogtopia, though, so I'm pondering whether to try to start up again. Alternatively I could just help my dog start a blog. Dogs are always blogworthy, even if they're not doing that much.

Been Memed

Agi  has a meme and was kind enough to tag me. This one is not going to be stellar, but I’ll do my best. It’s about your movie rental history or, if you don’t have one of those, then whatever the last ten movies you’ve rented or watched. I’m headed for Epic Fail here because I’m about two decades behind on my movie watching. What makes it even worse is that when I do get around to seeing one it’s likely not going to be anything I’m terribly proud of.

First let me say that Mr.Yenta is in charge of media acquisition around here. If I want to see something I let him know and he’ll see to getting it. He doesn’t rent. He usually buys on eBay. Then he either keeps it if he likes it enough or else sells it back on eBay. Frequently a movie comes out that I think I’d like to see when it’s available on DVD, but by the time it is, I’ve entirely forgotten. So, my recent movie history goes like this:

The two Queen Elizabeth movies. I’m a sucker for historical drama and books, too. Novels and actual biographies. I prefer more pre-Renaissance stuff, but I’ll watch what’s available.

Hancock. Was fun.

Lakeview Terrace. Well, we started it, but neither Mr. Yenta or I was having fun watching it so we decided we didn’t have to finish it if we didn’t want to.

We bought Slumdog Millionaire last week, but haven’t remembered to actually watch it.

Also, bits of whatever inexecrable thing Mr. Yenta is watching on Sci-Fi or Chiller. They often involve giant snakes or other reptiles.

Consider yourselves all tagged if you want to be. You know who you are.

Honored As I Am

I’ve Award Memed by Annette! I’m honored to be considered for this prestigious thingy. So here go the instructions:

1.You must brag about the award 
Check
2.You must include the name of the blogger who bestowed the award on you and link back to the blogger
Check 

3.You must choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design.
MMM..this is harder. It’s easy to come up with seven brilliant blogs – or 70 for that matter -  but some of them are just not going to do memes. Will try. 
4.Show their names and links and leave a comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog.
Leftist Grandpa
That’s Right, Nate
Write Chic
Soup Is Not a Fingerfood
Rabbit Hole
The View From Here
Citizen K

Half check. The links are up – obviously – but it’s going to take a little time to get around to tagging everyone in their own comments.

5.List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself.

Oh, lordy me. I don’t think there ARE ten things about me. I’ll try.

1. I was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and lived there for the first decade of my life before we moved to Long Island. (Lawn Guyland). Both of things are more significant as an ethnic heritage than any fluid running in my veins.
2. I’m not a very good housekeeper. I try, but it’s so damned boring. I’d rather be blogging. Like right now. Should be cleaning, but I’m blogging.
3. I’m an unenthusiastic cook most of the time. I do it, but I’d rather be blogging. I don’t have a lot of strong feelings about food either. A slice of pizza or a gourmet meal are both good. Too good.
4. Music is an overarching theme in my life but I have a tin ear and can’t even slightly carry a tune. My own children asked me to stop singing to them as soon as they could say “No!”
5. I love my job. I’ve only been there six years, which I think helps me truly appreciate it all the more. Working for an organization that has as its goal helping people instead of enriching some is a whole different thing. The working conditions suit me very well, too. Besides lots of compensated time off and paid medical, I have my own little office and I can wear jeans pretty much every day. Never thought the former cold go with the latter. Not a lot of money, of course, but then I kind of forgot to have the kind of career that would pay well anyway.
6. I’m 59 years old and I still hate dressing up as much as I did when I was 9. Way to mature – not. I’m still most comfortable in jeans.  See #5
7. My first love was art. My grandmother was an artist and the early consensus in the family was that I’d inherited some of her talent. I think that they may have been grasping at straws. I did study art when I was younger, but I haven’t painted in years and while I still like one or two of the things I did, great art, they ain’t. I sure do still like looking at art, though.
8. I have a rare disease. It’s not troubling me at the moment and it might never be a problem again, but I have CTCL, which is unusual enough that treatment for it has been developed under the orphan drug act. It took years to get a diagnosis so it was pretty far along when I finally knew I had it and got radiation and had to be on an oral medication for a year.
9. There was a husband before Mr. Yenta. That marriage ended while I was still in my twenties but it did produce my daughter so it can’t really be ignored. But Mr. Yenta and I have been married for over thirty years.
10. Mr. Yenta is somewhat disabled. He has a combination of things wrong with him that result in some days when he seems as fine as anyone but other periods of time when he can’t really get around at all and is in a lot of pain. The ratio of bad time to up time has been increasing of late, which causes us a lot of concern. He’s been home on Social Security Disability for the last couple of years. Life has been somewhat turbulent as we’ve had more changes in the last decade than in all the ones before, or so it seems.

Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind

Image via Wikipedia

Trouble ahead, lady in red,
Take my advice you’d be better off dead.

Chris from Paris  at Americablog laid some hate on The Grateful Dead and the people who love them last night. Overall, not well received. Last I looked there were 84 replies – mostly suggesting that Chris knew not whereof he wrote, or as more than one commenter explained, “Fuck You!”  It was fairly entertaining. Happily, Joelle showed Chris the error of his ways and while he might not exactly be ready to shine his love light on the Dead he’s at least admitting he just might have come off like an arrogant ass. I didn’t care for the original post either, but I have to admire anyone who’ll admit to such an error. A couple more trips to YouTube and he’ll be on Dead tour. OK, maybe not, but stranger things have happened.

You know, even if you never, ever get the music, any blogging, internet type should be giving credit where it’s due. Dead.net was bringing its own netroots together years before almost anyone. Macs were hippies before they were hipsters. And long before that the Dead was laying down the pre-digital foundation for viral marketing and allowed their live music to be freely shared. Encouraged it, in fact.

I doubt I’ll be going to any shows on this tour, but not because it wouldn’t be a great time. It surely would.

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Visitors

I just wanted to take a minute to say "Hi" to a couple of people who've been nice enough to follow this blog. And we don't even know where we're going.  Thanks to The Y River for following and I've done the same with his very interesting Occupied Territory Funk. I'm trying to get up to speed there.

The next arrival was the very gifted artist Patrice Lynne Young. She's got several blogs,  and I find each one a pleasure to visit. 

Most recently I noticed washwords on the list. She's a wonderful, thoughtful writer and Friday is Haiku day on her blog! How cool is that? So I just wanted to give a shout out and a word of thanks to our new friends.

Just one more thing.  There's one steady visitor from Northampton, MA. I don't know who it is, but if you're reading this, I'd just like to say I'm seriously jealous of you.  If I could pick up my life, more or less intact, and move it, I'd so be living there. What a beautiful, friendly and very progressive town. Not to mention dog-friendly. When we were there this summer, shopkeepers were providing bowls of water for dogs who had come out to help their owners with their shopping.  And, there's an Italian restaurant there that makes an artichoke ravioli with a basil tomato cream sauce that can take you to a higher plane of existance.

6th Time's the Charm?

I just noticed that today this blog is one month old. Now, I'm not going to be celebrating every monthiversary, but the first one is always special. I think this is my sixth blog, but this one is the real thing. I'm sure. It just feels right, like the eHarmony ads are always talking about.

It’s been a great first month. Traffic shot up from the high single digits to the (very) low single digits quickly. It’s been a pleasure to connect with old blog friends to make some wonderful new ones.  Blogger has made that much easier with their handy dandy new blogroll thingy, which tells you when your favorite blogs have updated. I’m really liking that.

I’ve got my blogging head back on straight. If you hear or read something interesting and your first impulse is to discuss it with friends or family instead of evaluating whether or not it’s blogworthy, well then you know you’ve lost your mojo. That’s where I was at, but no more. Now, once again, I can spend a whole evening saying nothing to Mr. Yenta but, “Please, I can’t talk now. I’m trying to blog.”

This blog has been so good to me that I thought I’d get it a little gift to mark the occasion, so I downloaded Windows Live Writer. It does have a lot of nice features and really handy plugins that you can download. Of course, the first post I tried with it, it froze right up. We’re giving it one more shot. I’d like that to work out because there’s a Zemanta plugin and Zemanta is really handy. I use it mostly for the photos and the links. It suggests the photos and provides them  and will put in the incidental links for you. If the photo is part of the point of the post, I wouldn’t use it, but if you just want something illustrative, it’s a great timesaver. I’ll also suggest tags and give you related links if you want them. So, I’m kind of crossing my fingers that this works out.

In any case, I just want to say thanks to everyone who’s dropped by, commented, followed, blogrolled and just generally been so friendly in our first month. Now I promise not do another post like this until it’s been a year.

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Apologies about comments

People are telling me that comments haven't been working well on this blog. I don't know what's up with that, but I'm very sorry. If people are nice enough to leave a comment I'd like them to be able to do so without any problems. I haven't done anything to modify the Blogger commenting system, so there's not too much I can do to fix it, but I have disabled the word verification, just in case that was the root of the problem. To avoid extreme spam I enabled comment moderation on posts more that a couple of weeks old.  I didn't even realize that was an option and might be a better solution.  If you find that there are continued problems please drop me a line at patsalzer AT gmail.com. Thanks so much.

B.A.D. Housekeeping

New blogs usually come with some sort of inaugural post, but this is B.A.D. times so I kind of plunged right in with that. I do owe a couple of words of thanks and that fits right in with the spirit of B.A.D. because it involves linking to blogs.

SinceI went to try Wordpress, Blogger has added some spiffy features. I haven't explored them all, but I particularly like the blogroll. Due to space considerations, I only chose to have the time of the most recent post for the blogs on the roll, but that's real handy. It makes it very easy to keep up with your favorite blogs, at least until the list gets really, really long.

"Follow" is another new-to-me feature. At first glance it seems a tad redundant, what with the blogroll, but it's nice and I'm pretty sure it'll turn out to have a thousand and one uses, so I put it in, Imagine my surprise when I had a follower! Hell, I'm not even sure where I'm going, so following could be kind of futile. It turned out to be Shelly of The View From Here and many other blogs! Thanks Shelly. It was a real boost to see that after one day. Following you right back. Then came Jon Swift. Yes, that Jon Swift. The Jon Swift who has become a legend among bloggers. I had put him on my own list to follow and Jon is incredibly kind, a true gentlemen and apparently his policy of reciprocation extends beyond the blogroll. I never expected that and I thank him very much.

Finally there's my new blog header. A modest thing, it's true. But it's me. As soon as I saw it, with the mugs of tea, the hand drawn thing...it is absolutely me. But I didn't do it. I got it the way people on the internets get things. By wandering around the series of tubes. First I went looking for a new Blogger template and landed on Eblog Templates, which has a great selection of them, most of them free. I downloaded several of gorgeous templates which I didn't end up using because I followed a link from there to Smashing Magazine which was offering, among tons of other goodies, free blog headers designed by artists in their community. I chose one made by Maria who is in Spain. Her blog is in Spanish, which I can't actually read, but I can at least say "Gracias" to Maria.

B.A.D. day for a new start?

It's Blogroll Amnesty Day from now until February 3rd, which is the real Blogroll Amnesty Day. I know this is true because I read it on Jon Swift and Skippy.

There are some rules for participating. One is to link to five blogs with less traffic than your own. Another is not to whine about how there are no blogs with less traffic than your own. I hope there can be an exception for a blog that was just started TODAY. I haven't really finished setting it up. And I have only just begun to blogroll! There are lots of favorites that aren't up there yet. This is not a whine. This is something I do to myself.

Actually, I'm kind of hoping that amnesty could extend to people who annoy other people who have been kind enough to link to them by changing URL's a little too often. More about that in another post. This one is about linking to other blogs. It is worth noting, however, that in between my old blog here and this new one, I blogged at Wordpress for a bit and met some lovely blogs that were new, or at least new to me. Some of my favorites:

That's Right Nate is a blog I came across this past year. It's relatively new, but Nate is building traffic very quickly because he's just that good. You read one post and you've got to go back for more.

WriteChic Press is another. She's a news pro who's doing her own thing now and has excellent analysis, lots of videos and a very cool take on things.

Soup Is Not a Finger Food - Well, with a name that's reminiscent of a Jean Kerr title, I had to check this one out. What I found was a woman, about a generation younger than myself, who you just have to like. She's witty, warm, sometimes reflective and always a good read.

Blog de Ford - A fellow from Indiana. He might have been the vote that put Obama over the top there. I was so happy for him when his state went blue. He went to the inauguration and has a wonderful post about it- with pictures.


Roadkill Refugee is political news, opinion, satire, lots of good videos and a daily visit won't hurt you a bit, unless you're a kind of thin skinned Republican.

Falling on a Bruise - Not new and it's here on Blogger. I only got to know this one recently, however. Lucy, whose blog it is, is British and very liberal. She writes on politics a lot. I hope I never get over the thrill of us regular people being able to have transcontinental exchanges without so much as a long distance charge. I imagine if you're only twenty-something that's just kind of ho-hum. At pushing sixty it remains a miracle.

That's six I think. There could be a lot more, but I have to get going with my son's birthday brunch. He's thirty today. Oy!