Maybe you Heroes fans knew this already, but Adrian Pasdar, who plays Nathan Petrelli on Heroes, has a YouTube account and posts up the periodic videos he makes with his costars. Looks like they’re a close-knit bunch. A close-knit bunch with a lotta downtime between scenes.
I wrote to the DMI website folks, and they wrote back to say that they knew the weird formatting was an issue in Schrute Farms reviews, but until they came up with a global fix, they had manually corrected the Mac users weird entries. They also inadvertently removed my paragraph breaks and I guess the system couldn’t handle RübeKinderArbeitProgramm, so it was changed to FreiKinderArbeitProgramm, but hey! Close enough! It does look better and I appreciate the timely response. Go Team DMI!
Pictured at left, by the way, is the beet o’lantern that I made to go with my review. Let me tell you, it is surprisingly difficult to hollow out a raw beet. Did you know that salt gets out beet juice stains? See, you learned something new today, and it’s going to be a better day because of it!
Over the weekend we bought a bike for Emily. She’s been asking for one. Here she is just after getting it, practicing pedalling while her father helps her balance and steer. It’s a fairly complex task, really, and much as I love Emily, I have to say that coordination is not one of her strong points.
Like all children, she wants to know how to do something NOW. Yesterday she wanted to try to ride with her hands off the handlebars. I also let her steer a little, which turned out to be a mistake, because I now have a scrape on my leg from where her pedal gouged me when the bike lurched to the left. Thank goodness I was wearing long pants. The scrape isn’t so bad, but it’s sore and I feel certain it’s going to bruise. I figured she’d be the one getting banged up riding this thing, not me. Oh well.
I had to put up the “if you ain’t in line, you might not get it by Christmas” note on the Jayne hat page. I’m still working on orders from Sept 10th, so I definitely wouldn’t want anybody to be disappointed should things continue to go slowly. So today, it’s stamping up boxes, writing Ma Cobb notes, packing up kits, and mo’ Jayne hats. I wonder what movie I should watch while doing this. Hmmm…
Hats up for: CO, CO, and CO. Go Colorado!
So I’m well acquainted with the notion that I have to strip out formatting from Word documents when I’m pasting them elsewhere. I have all the autoformatting turned off – something I learned to do the first time I was pasting special event messaging into Dragonrealms and none of the quotation marks showed up. Embarassing!
But I thought I had everything set correctly when I posted up this week’s Dunder Mifflin Infinity task, a review of Schrute Farms. But no, there’s plenty of freaky formatting to go around, and you can’t edit your entries once they’r submitted. I put a fair amount of effort into this – purchasing beets, photographing them, and Photoshopping them into my daughter’s easter egg carton. I even carved a freakin’ beet into a jack o’lantern. My fingers are still stained red. And it’s all for naught!
Darn you, Microsoft! Darn you all to heck!
ETA: Actually, I see another Mac user whose review looks like it’s all in ASCII. So maybe it’s not Word, maybe it’s Mac and Dunder Mifflin Infinity. Get with the times, DMI!
Emily’s class is doing “It’s the Hard Knock Life” from Annie for their Fall musical. Except she didn’t know there was such a thing as Annie. When she found out, she was super excited, so we had to rent it and see it.
She’s been watching it on and off for the past couple of days, doing other things, not really paying much attention, and never actually getting to the end.
Today, she had a very active day. She didn’t get as much sleep as usual last night, and then today she went with her father to Ray’s Splash Planet, then to the mall, so she’s good and tired now. She’s camped on the couch watching Annie and eating popcorn.
Just now, it was revealed that Annie’s parents were dead, something we’d told Emily was probably the case since she was an orphan. But they’re not just dead, they were killed in a fire.
Yikes.
Fire is a fear of Emily’s. She shouts for me to get the stove as soon as the timer goes off, she doesn’t like birthday candles, this is a big worry for her. So now she’s crying off and on, kind of quietly and sadly, and saying that the movie’s almost over. She doesn’t want to stop watching it, because we’ve assured her it has a happy ending, but she’s just so unhappy and tired right now. She wants it to be done.
She is so not ready to watch Bambi.
(My husband, by the way, is in the den with her, and I’m about to go back in – I’m not abandoning my child to blog.)
As sad as this is, it’s still nice to know she has empathy for these sorts of things. So many autistic kids don’t. We’re so lucky in so many ways. And now pardon me, I have to go get some popcorn for a sad little girl.
Greetings from beyond the grave! Yes, I moved to week two of the Couch to 5K podcast and I’m fairly sure that it actually killed me.
The first leg: “This isn’t so bad!”
The second leg: “This is more challenging than last week.”
The third leg: “It may have been too soon to move to week two.”
The fourth leg: “Maybe if I run toward the light…”
Everything else is just a blur. I arrived home with sweat pouring off of me like it was the very first day again. Now that I’ve drunk some water and squeegeed myself off, I’m red faced but much more comfortable. I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll do week two again next time or go back to week one. Maybe it’s like childbirth: you have to forget what it was like before you want to do it again.
Yesterday I sent out a mass e-mail telling folks that Jayne hat kits were available again, and a buncha people signed up overnight, so I’m cleaning up, then stuffing envelopes while I watch To Have and Have Not which I snagged from the library yesterday. No worries, there will be no actual Tvini sweat on the yarn.
I had to buy some red yarn retail, which isn’t good, but on the up side I now have six more skeins of earflap red! Yay! I just sent out mail to folks who had asked about kits over the last few days. I predict I’ll be winding up a heap of yarn tonight and tomorrow.
My Fiber Godmother package arrived! How fantastic was it? I took a picture of the unopened box, then set the camera aside to open it. After I opened it, I was so excited that I couldn’t remember where I put the camera, so a good post with pics will have to wait. Suffice it to say that this box is crammed to the gills with AWESOMENESS.
Thank you, Tracey! You’re the best!
I knew there was something I forgot.
I’m being interviewed tomorrow night for a podcast on account of the 486460099 Jayne hats. The interviewer seems like she’s got her act together, so I don’t think there’s anything vital we’re going to miss, but still:
If there were something you’d want to ask or know about me and the Jayne hats, what would it be?
On an unrelated note, I nearly went back and inserted a joke about The 500 Jayne hats of Bartholomew Cubbins but then realized I’ve passed that mark. Fantastic or freakish? You be the judge!
Searching for Bartholomew Cubbins then also brought up Bartholomew Cubbins’ blog about autism which I found interesting, since it led me to think about the book as an analogy for learning and neurological disorders. Shifting perspectives – always fascinating!