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Showing posts from November, 2019

Stay in your lane

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I was roller skating on my local rail trail recently and coming up to an intersection, so I was slaloming slightly (barely more than C-cuts) to slow down. Someone on a bike came up behind me and said, "On your left!" Alerting people that you're passing is customary and courteous, though I don't know if there are signs suggesting we do that on this trail, like there are on the trails where I skate in Florida. There are also no alligators or exotic birds on my local trail. I was startled and swerved back towards the far right. "Thank you," I answered with a little wave. As the guy passed, he tossed over his shoulder, "Stay in your lane!" My initial reaction was WTF, dude!? You @$$ 4073! However, I said nothing. First of all, are there lanes on the trail? No. The picture above is the actual trail, and that person on the bike is the actual guy. Is he in a lane? No, he's right in the middle of the trail. ( Hypocrite! ) Furthermore, a g...

There's always "something"

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I went on a spending diet several months ago. I have needed new roller skates for a while now, but I couldn't justify it, when I had things I needed to take care of for the kids and some outstanding credit card debt that I was trying to wipe out. So I cut out everything I could. I simply quit spending money on myself and started looking at ways to source things I needed from our town's Freecycle (a microwave and a yoga mat) and also learned how to do some basic repairs around the house, like fixing a door handle and a faucet. (I wound up giving away a lot of stuff on Freecycle, too...I think my mindset about "stuff" just changed.) I knocked off the credit card debt more than two months ago, so theoretically, I was ready to buy the skates. But then it was just one thing after another, every financial surprise I looked at as a setback to getting my skates. A $2,000 car repair, a $450 car repair, a goof up on an airline ticket that cost me $200 for the change fee...

A tale of two chairs (three, actually)

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This is a picture of my "new" chair. I saw it on the side of the road and it didn't dawn on me until I passed it that hey, I need an office chair.   Since I was listening to a good song on the radio and didn't specifically have to be back home (but did have a few things I needed to do before I returned to the ice rink to pick up my son from work),  I had time , I told myself. Plus, it will fit in the car I am driving! (It is my husband's SUV -- my car has been in one shop or the other for the past week: first to get a ding fixed that happened when someone at my son's college backed into my car when my son was using it because his car was in the shop and second to get the driver's seat back on track. It had become derailed when I backed it up over a baseball. Body shop and mechanic respectively.) I drove around the block and pulled over near the chair. I picked it up, carried it over to level ground, and sat in it. I felt around under t...

Scaling back to end my writer's paralysis

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" There's nothing wrong with realizing that WordPress is simply more than you need and discovering the love of simplicity that Blogger brings to the table."  I read that yesterday on " 15 Minute Mondays ." Moments later I was converting my XML export from my self-hosted WordPress site so I could upload it here onto Blogger. I was going to just upload it to a "free" WordPress site, but I am not sure that exists anymore. WordPress, I love you, and you have helped me so much in my professional career, too, but it is time for me to scale back. I can barely find a minute to write anything non-work-related so, I decided maybe it was a good idea to start blogging with my phone. So here I am sitting outside the hockey rink on a Saturday morning. I guess I'm not going to be able to do all that super fancy optimizing and graphics alt_text, but whatever... Get me off at bandwagon, too. I got that fortune recently. Why I even open the c...