Saturday, July 03, 2010

♥ Rene's Bluebells ♥

25 comments:

  1. Howard's da boy!!

    And the bluebells are gorgeous!!

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  2. Welcome home!! ♥

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  3. Just read the last thread. PUDDLE!!! OMG!!!
    Just the phrase "an aborted trip to emergency" gives me the shakes!

    Would rather stay up and converse about all of this, but I have to open the Library in the morning.
    Later skater!

    But...OMG!!!

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  4. Puddle, it all sounds much too exciting, and not in a good way. Still, I'm glad you were able to help. I reiterate, you are very Dean.

    Sorry for not being around much. I've been feeling kind'a weird, lethargic and generally blah, not sociable. I have been able to read though. Finished Stieg Larrson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the third and last of his books about Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist. They are excellent books, complicated to the point of being almost baroque at times, but gripping. They are violent, the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo extremely so. None of the violence is gratuitous though. There's nothing gratuitous or extraneous in these books. They are taut and spare as harp strings for all the marvelous richness.

    Larrson must have been a superb writer, rest his soul. But the translater, Reg Keeland, is also very talented. I've read translations before, and there's always something, some rough patch, some infelicity of expression or awkwardness of phrasing somewhere in the book, usually more than one. Keeland is a consummate artist. If it didn't say translated from the Sweedish by Reg Keeland, you would never in a million years know these books are translated.

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  5. Was talking about the trip at another place I blog, and was asked: how did we know the blood flow was stopping?

    ~~~~~~~~~~~
    Deal is: blood is wet. When it *feels* drier. . . . when we got back to the light, confirmed. We were using folded paper towels, so fairly easy to see how quickly it would get too wet. He was pretty shaken at the beginning, and was having a bit of a problem absorbing the idea that the pad was to exert pressure. He was trying to just sop up the blood initially. Once he "got it," the pressure started to work.

    When I first came here to the land of chainsaws and guns, I thought it'd be a good plan to take some advanced first aid, so signed up for EMT training. Only made it half way through the course -- discovered my blood pressure doesn't like the idea of rescuing peeps with 2 x 4s though various body parts. The *concept* of pressure staunching is actually just first aid, but having seen and semi prepared for much worse, I wasn't nearly as panicked as I would have otherwise been. It also kept me from letting him pull the dressing off to be able to "see" what was happening. . . . which would have been a disaster since we had nothing sterile to replace it with. The phone nurse seemed infinitely grateful that we hadn't ripped the dressing off. . . . But I think should I ever have to do this again, I'd make sure there were better first aid supplies available ahead of time. Going to improve my own, just in case. Funny, I *have* a sterile staunching pad from WWII. Daddy did war surplus for several years after the war, and we used to play soldier with them. After mama died, and we were "straightening" up, found prolly the last one, and brought it home. Still sealed. Weird stuff life throws your way, indeed.

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  6. Ick. Somebody hijacked my Yahoo email addy and is using it to send V**gra spam. I already wrote to Yahoo Help, so I hope they answer me. I get about 30 of those "V" spams a day. Mostly they go into my spam filter. What a waste of time for the senders as I'll never need them under any circumstances.

    I hate spammers. I wish them all a nice time in prison.

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  7. Some Russian goons did that with my earthlink addy about a year ago. The bounce was terrific for about six weeks. Then it died. No word since.

    Agree about spammers/hackers.

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  8. Here's the link to today's Flight Plan:

    http://www.mckuen.com/flights/flight.htm

    Happy birthday, Pete Fountain!

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  9. Several years ago my earthlink e-mail was being used to send spam. As soon as I figured out what was happening I contacted the abuse unit and changed my address. Haven't had any probs since, and eventually added that address back in to my account. I'm very grateful to have had no more difficulties.

    Susan, my sympathy! I hope you and Yahoo can get it sorted out ASAP.

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  10. Forgot to say Rene's Bluebells are just lovely.

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  11. Yep. Purty flowers.

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  12. I've been looking through JC's design blog:

    http://jcdesigns.blogspot.com/

    I miss her.

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  13. Should clarify that I was looking for a specific design, which I didn't spot. Wanted to post it in a discussion thread at FB where Kimmy was making fun of Denise's patriotism. That really irritated me, and I wanted to refute her snide remarks with JC's button that says IIRC "Proud of my country, ashamed of my government." But, I didn't see it. And I don't have the heart to search JC's CafePress shops, even assuming they're still there, which they probably aren't.

    ♥JC♥

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  14. Hi Cat. Could you refresh my memory regarding what you use for magnification on the computer screen?

    I'm working on setting up the laptop for my mother-in-law. Getting a little frustrated that two reasonably computer-savvy individuals are having such a hard time figuring out how to make desktop icons a bit bigger.

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  15. Warning. Comment may contain sarcasm. Please understand that it is directed at the corporate douchebags at CafePress, and not at you, Cat.
    ...
    Of course the stores are still there. CafePress is still able to make money from the designs whether or not they ever cut a check to a shopkeeper again.

    Okay, I'll stop short of a full CP rant, but here's the sticker you must be thinking of...

    http://www.cafepress.com/voteprogressive.67130104

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  16. Thanks, Renee. Actually, I had in mind a question whether anyone was still paying to keep up the stores, not what CP had or hadn't done with them.

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  17. Is this a Windows machine? If so, I can help. If not, not.

    To save time, assuming it is a Windows machine: Open the control panel and select Display. Select the Appearance tab. Depending on which version of Windows you're running, the choices will vary, but there should be a few schemes labeled Large and a few labeled Extra Large. Select one of these. At the bottom of the box are selection controls to adjust things like desktop icon size and a few other things.

    You can also adjust the mouse pointer. Go to Mouse from the Control panel. Again, there's a fairly good selection. I like extra large, high contrast but again, select what seems appropriate. There are other accessibility related controls there, like adjusting the width of the insertion point.

    There should also be an Accessibility thingy right at the top of the Control Panel. This includes other interesting and potentially useful controls.

    Setting all this stuff up is time consuming, but straight forward.

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  18. I helped out someone else with her CP shop once. She had paid for the premium shop and when I logged into controls, I saw this "helpful" reminder that she needed to update her credit card information so they could bill her. The shop had a negative balance, but remained open. As a matter of principle, I decided that I was going to get the store "in the black". It took quite a long time before she actually had enough earnings to see a check from them.

    Since that time, CafePress instituted that policy where shopkeepers only make 10% profit on all marketplace sales, and I advised this individual to switch to a basic shop before the store went back into a negative balance.

    Anyway, what this experience taught me is that CafePress will leave a premium store open indefinitely even if no one is paying. CafePress will get their cut "off the top", and if the store is in debt, any potential profits will go toward paying down that debt.

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  19. It is a Windows machine, and I had already visited the accessibility controls and spent some time poking around there. So far haven't found anything helpful. Haven't devoted huge amounts of time yet--spent part of today just clearing my stuff off the computer.

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  20. Oh, and I did try to adjust the contrast/size, but when I did that, there was no automatic adjustment made that spaced the icons further apart, so there was enlarged text all running together.

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  21. Think you need to make the icons bigger, also.

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  22. Yeah, I seem to remember all that sort of thing is manual.

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  23. You can make the icons bigger...

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  24. Renee, concentrate for now on Display/Appearance.

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