Results tagged "Programming"

Its been a few days now since Guest Birds have started landing here at For the Birds. I am both boggled and overwhelmingly flattered by the response that I have received. It’s been fun to connect with everyone in this new and interesting way…  Although, I do have to come clean and admit, however, that this was not originally my idea. Bloggers have been guesting or contributing since the beginning of Blognation… But it is unusual, perhaps, for a website such as For the Birds.

It all started when I was approached by a woman that is writing an allergy cookbook for kids. Those of you that read this blog know that this is a topic that I am deeply involved with so — it should come as no surprise that I rolled out the red carpet and agreed to have the author submit a guest post in promotion of her upcoming book. We emailed back and forth  – how exciting, blah blah blah… then silence. Nothing. Just my voice echoing in the caverns of the internet… I waited for two weeks and then emailed her again…

See — I am an avid scheduler. I even schedule things that have already happened. And then there is my patience and the lack there-of. So the relationship was beginning to itch a little when she responded – Next week she would be sending me her piece. Hurrah! Quick to the Internet – tell the world! And so I did … Well, either I took my wit and hit her over the head with a cinder block or Ooops, stuck my foot out and Whoops down the marble stairs she fell… Or… (read from the bottom up)

Yesterday…while I was twittering, checking my email, designing a logo, writing an allergen free cookie recipe and driving back from Hampton Bays where I had purchased a pound of nutritional yeast, it occurred to me that my brain was on overload. Genetically modified soy overload. Information anxiety overload. Kids are riding around in spaceships when they are really hiding in the attic before blowing chunks on the Today Show overload. David Byrne was on the radio and a woman was walking by pushing a terrier in a baby carriage. It had started to rain again. I had reached maximum capacity. My mind was feeling a little like mush and slowly I started to think about Dr. Pepper – and how I used to love to walk barefoot up my parent’s street to Ada’s candy store to buy the soda and then linger back home again. Then I thought about the time that my parents gave me a few dollars and told me to go to Ada’s to buy some gum before we left for a flight out of town. I remember thinking  – wow, dollars worth of gum? What kind of gum should I get? I told Ada to fill the bag with bucks worth of every kind of gum she had. She was a little grumpy – suggesting that my parents didn’t really want that much gum, but I insisted. Every kind of gum she had.

This was just my take on the situation – my analysis of the quest I had been given. There were no specifics involved–had there been, I would have done what was expected of me. I would have just bought one pack of Wrigley’s and returned with change. I could have been spared the disappointment, but the concept of every kind of gum was way more fun. Or I could have just listened to Ada. But what did she know? She’d only been running a penny candy store for 100+ odd years listening to kids  – one of these and one of those and two of those… yelling at teenagers trying to steal cigarettes… attempting to sneak up the stairs in the back to see just how many bodies she was preserving… one of these, four of those.. 2 more of those, no not those.. those… that one, and two of… OH ADA, JUST GIVE ME THE GUM. And so she did, and when I returned home with all of the newly purchased gum it was unbelievable to me that my decision making skills were a little off the mark. What do you mean you don’t want dollars worth of every kind of gum Ada had? But don’t you know that in 20-something years from now I am going to be driving back from Hampton Bays with a pound of nutritional yeast remembering this?

A few weeks later, it was all forgotten until one afternoon I was walking our dog Henry… there she was careening off her porch — “HOW WAS THE GUM?” — thanks Ada.

The arrival of the Great Silver Trunk (GST) has made me make a few evaluations and decisions this week. First off, I have decided to keep everything in the trunk.. I took it all out — discarded gross things like old smokes and voodoo candles (wonder if they worked) — took note of what was there and then put it all back in. Someday — someday I will open it again and review… It’s like a time capsule.. perhaps disturbed a decade (or four) too early. I did, however, take out the JC Penney shopping bag with it’s precious contents… Now that it has been exposed to year 2009 air quality– I think some archival portfolioing is in store — the plastic shopping bag is weary. Let’s let it rest.

I have moved the GST up into my home office–which then required a bit of mandatory organizing via a reorganization. This has inspired me to tackle the rest of the house… The picture cabinet – the dining room (aka storage facility) – finish the “powder room”… take charge of the mud room. It isn’t that we live in disorganized chaos – I just still have paper work on my dresser from Will’s birth…. almost TWO YEARS AGO…The time has come, my little friends, to talk of
other things…Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and
kings…And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wigs–Calloo, Callay, come run away…With the cabbages and kings.

In other news… For the Birds has it’s own DOMAIN!!! YAY!! WAAHOOO!!!  http://forthebirdsblog.com — You can still use the old stinky one… but this one is shiny and new. Please note that we are still stalking the evil birders at forthebirds.com — oh yes, we are. 

I was looking for the visual… and thanks to The Wavy Rule, I didn’t have to go far… http://emdashes.com/2009/01/presenting-a-steinberg-to-kick.php