Oooooh….. Shiny!

Sorry posting’s been a bit light again. I have got a ton going on this week, but I’m also… (ahem)… playing with WordPress.org – and I am just rather enamored of its sheer awesomeness.

My mad techgeekchick skillz don’t seem to be serving me that well this time and I feel a little bit like a newbie trying to learn Windows 3.x all over again in that respect – and there is just SO much stuff!!! – but it’s pretty neat and I’m having fun. And have fallen in love with the hosting company (Host Gator) after my yucky experiences elsewhere (I won’t say who, but feel free to ask me which companies to avoid at all costs). I actually made a spontaneous decision (based on the recommendation of a WordPress.org expert) to jump over there after pulling my hair out for hours trying to install and update a WordPress blog where I was, and when I got set up at Host Gator, I had the thing on and live in less than five minutes (as well as some really cool other stuff that came with the account).

I’ll let you guys take a look at it when I get a little more moved in and situated. I don’t project that I’m going to move the Zone over there  – well, maybe someday, but I’m still rather attached to WordPress.com and even though it’s probably dumb of me, I never really wanted to put any advertising on the personal blog and whatnot. Now, the music blog, that might be another story – but I’m not jumping ship from WordPress.com with the personal blog anytime soon.

This new adventure is pretty cool though, I’m getting a kick out of playing with it. I just hope I don’t break anything, eek.

Well That’s A Pleasant Surprise…

Finding a new Twitter widget in your WordPress dashboard that you didn’t know was there is pretty cool for a Friday the 13th.

Wonder how long that thing’s been there without me noticing…

The State of Volunteer State Dudeblogging

I had had this rather damning post on the backburner in draft for some time where I was going to cry and whine and moan about the fact that “most” of my fave Tennessee dude bloggers that I’ve been reading for years had pretty much hung up the keyboard.

But then since I originally started that post and left it sitting in my drafts eight or ten months ago, two things have happened. First, two of the ones I was going to pout about most  – CeeElCee and FreakyWeasel – showed up again. Yay! (Well, actually FreakyWeasel never left, just nobody told me he’d relocated. I went to his old blog one day and was shocked to find him gone, and when I asked about it, everyone was all quiet about it like it was some big conspiracy so I didn’t ask again.)

And though it’s been a while now since his return, Roger also came back, which made me and a large portion of the regional blogosphere all happy and stuff.

Anyway, then there my other discovery, when I got to looking at my blogroll – I discovered less of the dude contingent had dropped out than I’d really realized, which I suppose part of the reason it seemed to be like “all” the men had quit was because so many of the ones that went MIA were just huge favorites. Still, there are loads of dudes I like to read still out there – Mike, Michael, Christian, Joe, Jack, Jackson, Kleinheider, Jon, Michael Silence, Chris, Jeffraham, Sean, Wally, Mack, Frank, Rob, and Ron (who’s not a Tennessean but we kinda adopted him), to name a few. And a few more I’ve picked up along the way, like Steve and Steve.

And then there are some that aren’t writing much lately, but still show up from time to time and I’m thankful for that – LeBlanc, Jon, Slarti, and the very much missed (and not Tweeting lately either!!) Hutchmo. I’m glad you guys are still around, I wish we’d see more of you though. And these two, too.

So I guess my originally months ago intended post about how the blogger women were kicking the men’s butts bigtime by still going at it when all the dudes had quit is unwarranted and unnecessary now.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss the heck out of reading Sarcastro, Knuck, Rex, and Kerry Woo any less, even though three of the four still entertain me on Twitter regularly. (ADDED: I knew I’d forget someone here – Russ. Who also still entertains me on Twitter regularly, but still, dang it.)

If somebody misses reading you, I bet you’ve still got something to say. Sigh.

Faking It Like It’s Real

Sometimes I forget that not everyone who stops by here is in the mix with the Nashville blogging crew (and by Nashville I actually mean mostly Nashville but some Memphis and some Knoxville and lots of other parts of Tennessee and also some non-Tennessee cities like Louisville and well, you get the idea). I probably should have posted this closer to the beginning of the month but ah well, it’s still early October.

Over at Tiny Cat Pants, Aunt B. created this really super cool little project for October that you should go check out. She’s posting one ghost story a day, every day in October.

The thing is – they’re all fake. But the other thing is, they’re all based around facts and known legends in Nashville, Davidson County, Middle Tennessee in general.

She has just done an absolutely outstanding job weaving together these legends and historical facts in with spooky hooey – so much so that I keep forgetting the stories aren’t real.

A fine time’s to be had this haunted season over there, so go check ‘em out every day, there’s a new one up every evening. They’re easy to spot among the rest of the blog posts because there’s a nifty interactive map on each one, and they’re numbered. (But heck, read the rest of the blog while you’re there, too – that’s one I read religiously daily).

I can’t decide which one’s my favorite so far – this one or this one – but I’m sure that’s going to change again as the month progresses.

Nope, Not Dead Yet

Well, hello there. I bet you maybe thought I wasn’t coming back, unless you’re on Twitter and in that case you knew I was awake online again. Pffft, I always come back eventually.

This blog will be 13 years old in February and I suppose it’ll still be here 13 years from now. Or somewhere anyway.

There’s really not much to say – which is kind of ridiculous because I bet I’ve had 100 blog posts written in my head. It was a really trying summer. Things are (maybe, hopefully) getting a little better now.

We lost Little, the last of the elderlies, a couple of weeks ago. She was a very old kitty at 17 or 18 (I never can remember which year she came here), and had been very sick for a long time, so it was time. The oldest four-footed thing in my house right now is 12, which seems odd. Everybody else is fine. I’m still trying to get used to not having a dog around that is scared to death of thunderstorms (and rain) anymore, or fireworks. Instead Dobie’s niece and nephews bark at fireworks, which is certainly more annoying.

There’s more, I’m sure, I’m a bit sleepy this morning though so this will be short. I thought we were supposed to have thunderstorms today, so I stayed up through the night working, thinking today would be a good nap day. Silly me, I practically need sunglasses indoors today, it’s so bright.

Hopefully anyone who’s subscribed via feed will get this. I discovered accidentally, several weeks ago on the MMH blog, that Feedburner had been scooped up by Google (thank goodness not Yahoo which now has its hands in my AT&T mail which works like crap now), and stuff had changed and I needed to migrate the feed, so hopefully this post is showing up both on feed and in MyBlogLog.

Also, unless you’ve got the feed or never had anything but the WordPress link, you may not even know I’m still here yet since I’m having a little bit of a disagreement with my domain & web host (i.e., they suck and their account re-up tactics suck even more). I’ll straighten that out eventually, but for now you can bookmark/link @ http://thelynnsterzone.wordpress.com/ – same for the music blog except it’s lynnstersmusiczone – it’s always been here anyway and will never change.

More later, I’m yawning despite the wayyyyyyy too bright sun.

Anorexia Jetsonia

I haven’t really been in a blogging mood, which I guess has been kind of obvious.  And I hate that, because I have let something slip by on the music blog I absolutely did not mean to, but maybe I can get myself sort of re-motivated into things next week.

Anyway, no, I haven’t really been in a blogging mood, and apparently I’m not in an eating mood either.  Which is kind of bad when you only eat maybe once a day and sometimes not anyway, which is kind of good when you’re almost too poor to eat anyway, but I know it’s not good and healthy to only eat maybe once a day and possibly even not.

I DO get hungry.  It’s just that there’s nothing I want to eat, and if there is, after two bites I’m over it.  Stuff I have eaten and liked my entire life – I don’t want it and/or it doesn’t taste good.  Everything is just totally blah.  In a way it’s a good thing that I don’t eat much when I eat anyway, but it’s just kind of disturbing to get two or three bites into something and just be like totally unable to finish.

The only things I really want to eat are breakfast food or Mexican food.  But the way things are going – even though I’m too destitute to be able to go out to eat – if I COULD go eat at Cafe Ole every night this week, I’m afraid by night #2 I would be over that too and not want that either.   Or Waffle House.  Which is totally unimaginable to me that I could go in either and not feel like eating anything on the menu, but there ya go.

I was kind of jonesing for some Pancho’s today and like I said, Mexican food is one of the few things that sounds good these days.  So since I had to go to the grocery store anyway, I picked up fixings for nachos and grabbed some Pancho’s dressing too and that pretty much satisfied the craving AND I did actually eat and it was good.  Except I ate so little and there’s so much left that I could probably eat for the next week… and now I’m a little afraid I’m going to lose my appetite for the one thing I always have an appetite for.  Plus I ate so little, but so way much more than I usually do, so now I’m stuffed and miserable.

I bought some bananas today because they looked good and appealing – which I’m sure I will eat.  I like fruit, I just don’t buy much because normally most would wind up going to waste.  Maybe I should just buy fruit for a while.  But what if I start not wanting to eat fruit either?

Weren’t things supposed to be like The Jetsons by now anyway, where you just took a pill and bam, that was an entire meal, and we all fly our cars around instead of driving them and – right?

Oh Hai

I am just knee-deep in fifteen tons of stuff right now and don’t really have any time for anything but the HAVE-to stuff right now.  That’s my explanation for the quiet.

Well, that and I don’t really have anything to blog about at the moment.  I could gripe about the fact that I got the phone call last night from the ex that I knew would eventually come (because it always does, eventually) and had dreaded for the last nine years, but I really don’t want to talk (or think) about that either.  It went okay, I suppose, depending on what your definition of okay is.

And a few weeks ago one of my e-mail accounts started getting overloaded suddenly with Greek spam, which I find the phenomena has now wended its way to my blog comments and the Akismet bucket.  Weird.

Other than that, I got nothing.  Newscoma’s down sick this week and posting all kinds of wacky stuff from the newspapers over there as well as other interesting stuff – go visit her and see.

Wanderlust

My friend Julie and I go back a long way. We went to high school together a class apart, then later shared an apartment for a while during college. She was already in Memphis when I moved down here in 1988, and not too long after that gave birth to her first child, which began a journey for her as a single mom that was always simply amazing to me how she hung in through some unbelievably difficult times, but she did it all like a pro.

Since then she’s become a mother twice more, the last born earlier this year, after she’s already been a grandmother for four years. It’s rather tickled me that she’s a year younger than me but the grandmother of a four-year-old (I should be shot, I know). She’s been out in Utah for about 17-18 years now. Many moons have passed since the days of our old apartment up at MTSU where we used to go to sleep at 6 a.m., get up about 6 p.m., watch MTV all night and throw empty beer cans at Martha Quinn whenever she was on.  Oh, and sometimes go to class.

Julie’s always been adventurous in a way I never dared to even think about being. After a period of living and working at Utah’s Seabase, she and hubby decided to pack up the kids, cats, and I dunno what all else in the camper and hit the road and just wander a while. The kids have always been homeschooled, and hubby has a job where he can telecommute, so they’ve been able to just wander as they please this summer. Most recently they’ve headed back to Salt Lake City (where she was forevah) so Julie could do a month-long stint volunteering at The Breastfeeding Cafe events and classes.

She’s been blogging her adventures from the road, and it’s been a really interesting read thus far. So meet my Gypsy friend – she’s taken some really cool photos along the way too.

Tags, Categories, Labels, Topics, Subjects – Ahhh, Identifier Overload!

So maybe I’m just being unusually stupid about something I’m not usually so retarded about, but why would I want to use categories AND tags too? What’s the purpose?

Any WordPress (com or org) folks want to enlighten me on this mystery? I know tags suddenly appeared out of nowhere in my WP dashboard several months ago, but I can’t honestly think of a reason to use them unless I’m just missing something really important. Categories have always suited me just fine and this tag box is kinda in my way, unless there’s really some infinitely important reason to be using them.

In That Short Bus Kinda Way

So yeah, I have been blogging for almost eleven and a half years, and just last night I registered over at BlogHer.

Uh huh, I’m a little bit slow sometimes.

Also, I got involved in a comment discussion this week about a subject I never ever in my life thought I would be discussing with a group of people online.  I can’t tell you what it was about nor where it is because most of you can’t see it anyway, but suffice it to say I am still a little bit weirded out about just how bizarre it was to find myself in such a discussion, albeit with a fine group of folks.  Life is really strange sometimes, not necessarily in a bad way, just bizarre.