OmegaMom

I like my blog.  It’s a nice, cozy place, where I get to rant and rave and philosophize about whatever I want, and inflict pictures of my darling dotter or other members of the family on The Public.  It skeeves me out that blog scrapers come by on a regular basis, grab a paragraph and a link, and then slap it up on a blog-ad-site (blad?) filled with AdSense ads, but it’s certainly better than folks who grab your entire blog, change some details, and publish it as their own (I’ve encountered this a few times, second- or third-hand).  It bothers me that there are people out there who will steal your pictures of your life, your child, and pretend the pictures are their own, illustrating their own life.

I can actually sort of understand it, though.  There are people out there who yearn after validation, who want to be seen as creative, as kind, as loving, as beautiful–whatever image it is that they are seeking, and stealing, they’ve got a serious self-image problem.  While I think plagiarizing like that sucks dead toads and should be the object of scorn and contumely, I also feel sorry for these folks.

But what the hell possesses people to start up an email with a lie?  You don’t know ahead of time that your email is going to go viral…

OmegaGranny recently sent me a forwarded email.  There were two lines of text, and 26 photos.  The text read: 

Entries for an art contest at the Hirshorn Modern Art Gallery in DC

The rule was that the artist could use only one sheet of paper.

The photos–the photos were awe-inspiring.  Fascinating.  Lovely.  Amazing.  Beautiful.  Quirky.  Sad.  Thought-provoking.

The photos were also very familiar to me.  I was dubious that these were the work of multiple people, because I could swear I had seen these very same pieces of artwork on one person’s website.  But I wasn’t sure.

So first I went off to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.  I couldn’t find anything that related to an "art contest".  I did an advanced Google search of the entire website, and didn’t find anything.

I went to Snopes, just to see if they had anything listed.  Nope. 

So then I googled "paper art".  Because I was sure I had seen these pictures before.

And lo and behold, the very first link that shows up when you google "paper art" is the site of Peter Callesen, a Scandinavian artist who has been creating paper art for years.  Every single one of those 26 photos is directly from his website.  He’s been published in books, he has had oodles of shows in Europe (none at the Hirshhorn, by the way), he has permanent art up on display in various corporate places.

He’s a "name".  It’s his work.

Why?  Why would someone send out an email claiming his artwork is the result of an anonymous collection of art contest entrants?  Why on earth didn’t they just say, "OMG.  You have to see this guy’s artwork!  He’s a genius!"?  There’s no need to actually copy the photos (a violation of copyright) and send them on in an email–just provide a link to his website.

What is the motivation in doing something like this?  The person who originally sent the very first email (first in a long chain, trust me, because googling the text pulled up a large number of hits) knew that what s/he was doing was telling an outright lie about the artwork.  Why deny the artist of his recognition?  This man has worked long and hard establishing a reputation in the art world.  Why steal it and apply it to no-one in particular?

Gah.  It’s frustrating to me.  Anyway, as a result of that email, I have a post for the day, and I have a website to point y’all to.  Go look at Peter’s website.  Enjoy his artwork.  It’s amazing.

The explosion of the Internet has its glories–I found our first house on the Internet long before it was the normal way to look at houses, I pay my bills by Internet by preference, I book flights and hotels and learn about adoption via the Internet.  I started out long ago on Usenet, following alt.callahans, then moving to misc.gettingmarried or whatever it was, then misc.pregnancy, then alt.infertility.  And some email lists.  Then I moved on to message boards.  Then blogs.

(But not Twitter.  Or miniblogs.  Or other Web 2.0 social networks.  I joined a few blogging networks, but haven’t really done much with them.)

All of which revealed to me that the written word has an amazing ability to be misconstrued.

Some people can write well.  Some people can’t.  Some people can read well.  Some people can’t.

Writing blog posts, or bulletin board posts, or Usenet posts can be fraught with uncertainty:  Sometimes what you write, meaning one thing, becomes read in a totally different manner.  I’ve had this happen before, and wrote about it before, and when it happens, you become totally flabbergasted, appalled:  But…but…that’s not what I said!  Or:  But…but…that’s how it reads, but that’s not what I meant!

So some people litter their posts with emoticons to ensure that their meaning is not misread.  Or, occasionally, someone who has been misconstrued to the point where they feel they’re disliked, may start sprinkling lots of emoticons to the max, hoping–like a puppy dog wagging its tail–the readers will "read" see?  see?  I’m not being snarky or condescending!  I’m making a joke!  Laugh!  Please!  Please don’t take this the wrong way!  Please don’t be angry at me!  And then, people being people, maybe others will take the overdose of emoticons as a sneering reminder that They Don’t Read Things The Right Way, and take it as being condescending.  Enough of this interaction, and the puppy-like emoticons morph into exactly what is being seen:  an angry tirade, a way of saying:  Damn you idiotic fuckers anyway, this is a joke but I know you’re not going to get it, so maybe if I put goddamned neon lights around it you’ll recognize it (though I doubt it).

Oy.

Long ago and far away, on a private board, someone wrote about her bad body image.  How it affected her life.  How miserable it made her.  Lots of people wrote back, doing the womanly "Uh-hunh, I hear you, girl, I know what you mean!"  Someone else wrote back about her bad body, how she was "ugly", and she used a phrase that I read as being written with a sort of rueful snort, a form of rolling her eyes at herself.  Others in the discussion read it a totally different way–it was seen as a slam, a piece of spiteful cruelty.  The disjunction between the two led to an all-out fight.

Oy.

I’ve seen it play out elsewhere:  something that’s meant jokingly or ruefully or in a silly way gets taken seriously.  Someone saying idly "Lordy, I wish (insert President’s name here) were dead" gets turned into an investigation from the FBI into a death threat.

Oh, it happens in real life, too.  Miscommunications abound.  A guy says to his wife "Yeah, I look at those girls’ tushies and boobs and want to mess around with them", thinking he’s just being honest and open, and she decides it means he’s having a mid-life crisis and is about to leave her.  Or a college girl’s parents tell her, after she announces she’s getting an apartment of her own, "How are you going to pay for all that?!" (meaning pay for an apartment while she’s attending college) and she hears "How are you going to pay for an apartment AND COLLEGE?!" (meaning pay for everything, since she’s obviously about to go out on her own and that means she’s not going to have college paid for anymore) and immediately drops out of college.

But it’s a lot harder to have things totally misconstrued when you’re talking in person.  There are physical cues:  lifted eyebrows, shrugs, blushes, rolling eyes, a V-8 whap against the head.  There are a million different non-verbal cues in person to let someone know you sympathize, you’re joking, you’re being serious, you’re angry, you’re bored.  We’re hard-wired to learn all these cues from childhood.  When they go missing–on paper or on a computer screen–we’re left with only our own extrapolations to fill in the blanks. 

Maybe my extrapolations are the ones out of whack.  Maybe where I saw the puppy-dog trying to wiggle its way back into the graces of friends, I was wrong.  Maybe when I "heard" the rueful snort, I was wrong.  Maybe all those other people were right.  I’ll never know.

(For the record, this has nothing to do with any bloggy blow-ups that have happened recently or in the past.)

Onto other things:  Anocat wanted to know what "that pink thing" was.  It’s called "Pinkie Pie’s Balloon House™, a three-level My Pretty Pony extravaganza of small unnecessary plastic items that garnered awestruck indrawn breaths from almost every girl at the party.  Noreen wanted to know how many attended:  There were four girls and one boy who showed up, plus a small sibling who was supposed to be outside in the general play area but who hung around the glass door with such a sorrowful face, sobbing, "Sissy!  Sissy!" that we let her in, too.

Dudes.  Please.  It’s not "exasperating the decline", it’s exacerbating the decline.  (Third paragraph down.)

My PalPal change-of-address rant garnered many similar complaints.  The one that really caught my eye, though, was Del’s link to a similar complaint by someone who is using PayPal to accept registration fees for a conference.  Ack!

Since I had everyone in my corner, I was feeling righteous.

Since everyone had said that they had similar problems and finally gave up, I was not feeling hopeful.

But I had sent out a plaintive missive to PayPal help, via their website form:

Surely this isn’t an unusual question!

We’ve moved.  I want to update my address and phone number.  But in order to update my address and phone number–you have to contact me at my old (NO LONGER VALID!!!) phone number or address!!!

I call the customer service phone number as suggested.  I go to
“update/change account information”…then it tells me to go to the website!

Sorry for all the exclamation points, but I am getting EXTREMELY
FRUSTRATED.

My husband has had the same problem with his PayPal account.
Please help.  PLEASE.

And you know what?

I got a response.

From a real, live human being!

And she was nice and understanding!

And she “reset” my account!

And I was able to remove the old address, *poof!*

And I was able to remove the old telephone number, *poof!*

And I was able to even change the primary email address, so I no longer have to log in using the old address (which will be defuncticated while I am off visiting OmegaGranny)!

So, I have to give PayPal a halfhearted pat on the back.  The pat on the back is because they did help.  The halfhearted part is that they shouldn’t have needed to help.  This is not an unusual request, I am sure; there must be thousands of people registered with PayPal who move every month.  They need to fix their system, because it should not require me getting frustrated and having to contact their help desk to get this fixed.

When you move 4,000 miles away from your old abode, your address changes in lots of far-flung places.

So, in this age of the wonder that is the intertubes, you sit down at your computer once you have sorted out all the details (like, say, where you’re going to live, and what your phone number is going to be), crack your fingers in a semi-macho display, poise the hands over the keyboard like Leonard Bernstein, lift a hand…

…and type http://www.bofa.com…

…and Hey Presto! you’re there, you answer a few security questions that no-one else is ever going to know (your father-in-law’s middle name is not exactly common, nor is it exactly common knowledge outside your spouse’s circle), and voila, you have happily changed your primary address and phone number and your bank statements are now delivered to your bank-o-mailboxes at your new address by the postal person and you’re happy.  Well, kinda.

You do the same with a variety of services.

All on the web.

All nice and easy.

All using Sekrit Kwestshuns with Sekrit Ansers that only you know.

And you go along with your life, merrily having a grand ol’ time trying to adjust to life in your new abode.

Then one day you discover Etsy.  Some wicked woman lists some artists in her “gifts for less than $50″ blog post, and you foolishly click on the links, and you are in love and you MUST.  HAVE.  THESE.  THINGS.  NOW.  (Especially since you are trying to decorate a new house, and counteract the continually shrinking amount of sunlight by scattering Bright Things around the house.)

Now, Etsy allows you to use PayPal.

You have a nice small amount in your PayPal account, due to your previous go-round with blog ads (and you wistfully hope that your new go-round with blog ads will prove as pleasantly pseudo-lucrative).  So you decide to purchase your new treasures using PayPal.

There’s a little note at Etsy when you select PayPal to pay; it says to be sure your shipping address in PayPal is the correct one.  So you schlep over to PayPal’s website, knowing you haven’t changed your address, so maybe it’s time to change it.

And you think you’ve done it, and order your Glittering Things, and the shipping address that shows up is not your new address.

So you scratch your head.  “Say what?!  Dayum.  I know I changed that address.  Hunh.  Maybe I need to change the address that’s marked as the main address.” 

You are in a maze of twisty, turny passages that all look alike.

You are in a maze of turning, twisty passages, all looking alike.

You are in a maze of twisting, turning passages that all look alike.

First you add an address.  That works.  Then you add a phone number and an email address.  That works.

Then you try to make the new address your primary address and delete the old one.  You get a page that says they will contact you with a Sekrit Code so you can confirm the changes.

They will contact you at your primary phone number, which is not the new phone number you just added.

OR…

They will contact you at your mailing address.  Which just happens to be the old mailing address.

OR…

You can select “Other”, which brings you to a page where they say to contact Customer Service at this particular phone number.

So after trying a few go-rounds (surely there’s a way to get your new address and/or new phone number to appear in the drop-down??), you grit your teeth in frustration and call the phone number (which is not toll-free).

You get a nice pleasant-sounding computerized voice.  You follow its instructions.  You select the “change customer address and/or phone number” option.  You get a voice message that says…

“Did you know you can change your address and phone number on our website?  We’ll be sending you instructions on how to do this to your email.”

See OmegaMom.

See OmegaMom’s eyes bug out.

See OmegaMom turning red.

See OmegaMom start howling.

See OmegaMom jump up and down in frustration, just like her five-year-old daughter does.

See OmegaMom go wash dishes to get away from her frustration.

See OmegaMom sit down at the computer once again to try to figure out how to contact a real, live human being who might be able to help her do something that LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF PAYPAL CUSTOMERS MUST WANT TO DO, JUST LIKE HER!!!

Now, really.  Banks do it.  Utilities do it.  Lots of places that are just as needful of security measures as PayPal do it OVER THE INTERNET.  Without all this rigamarole.  Why the fuck can’t PayPal?!?!

I just want to be able to use my “OmegaMom fund” to be able to buy myself some kewl artwork.  Is this too much to ask?

Grrrr.

So I’ve sent an email to their help desk.  Now I have to wait until Monday to be contacted.  The Kozmik All is no doubt arranging, right now, for the person at PayPal to ignore my offered new phone number and new email addresses, and try to call my old phone number.  ARRGGGHHHHHHH!!!

Remember, I didn’t participate (whew!).  But bunches and bunches of my regular blogstops did, and the whole slew of them are getting practically giddy with relief now that today is the final day and they are out of Blogging Durance Vile.

As a reader, of course, this sucks, because I’ve been happily seeing 25-30 new posts every morning by some of my faves.  And then 20 more as the day goes by.

But they’re giddy, I tell you!  Yelling “Whoopeee!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Thank GOD that’s over with!”  Dancing in the blogging streets.  Setting off fireworks.  Revelry. 

Bah.  Pooey.  Pbbbbbttt to the lot of them.  Harrumph.

Cast yer eyebones over to the left.  The Giving Tree is gone; all my Donors Choose projects were funded, though not all the way by my readers.  In its place is the Shameless Commerce Division (shamelessly cribbed from Car Talk), an experiment wherein I signed up with the BlogHer Ad Network.  We shall see; I’m hoping it doesn’t end up stalling blog loading.  If it does, please let me know.  Goodness only knows if I’ll get a few cents per month.

I need to send you on to Almost Quintessence, BlueGrassGirl’s blog, for a particular post all about having a dead bird in the freezer.  BGG is the sister of Jozet (of Halushki fame).  There’s obviously a hilarity gene, and the girls have got it.

The OmegaFamily is working very hard on the concept of “frustration” and how to handle it.  OmegaDad, in a fit of genius, came up with “The Attention Game”.  He told the dotter all about using her “ability”, which included listening and paying attention.  He tests her by giving her tasks, and if she does them, she gets a point.  If she doesn’t get it right, he gets a point.  They’re playing up to 30 points this weekend.

This has been prompted by the dotter’s absolute inability lately to deal with frustration, in any way, shape, or form.  She melts down and goes into stubbornness mode, wherein she keeps trying to do whatever it is that is frustrating her, and is crying and keening and whining while she does it, and is generally a drama queen about it.

This frustrates me to no end, and makes me snappy and snarky.  OmegaDad rode his white horse to my rescue this evening with this game.  I’m hoping it actually sinks in a bit with the competitiveness aspect, because the dotter’s response to her frustration is just irritating as hell.  I end up feeling like I want to run screaming into the street, far, far away.  The dotter, of course, thinks I’m abandoning her, and follows no matter where I go.  This makes me more uptight, and makes me want to retreat, and she gets more panicky and wants to cling, and it turns into a Spiral of Disturbance.  Bleah.

I go away now and play with Etsy.

Well.  Who’d'a thunk it?  My commentary about my *#@!% raw data being changed had two people wanting to know more!

Here’s the scoop, interesting only to about four of my readers, maybe five:  I’m grabbing data from our campus data warehouse via a web report.  (This means that other data providers won’t work, sorry, Jane!)

Once upon a time, before there were a series of high-profile data break-ins at colleges and universities (not ours), folks like me on campus were able to just link directly to the accounting system and grab the data as read-only users.

Now, alas, the IT department is more security minded.  This is Good!  Really!  In general.  But not for folks like me, small potatoes applications systems analysts working for particular departments, that want to be able to do things with the data.

Because instead of being able to link directly to the data…or even the data warehouse snapshot of the data…now we have to use (ack gasp barf) Business Objects to access the data.  And we can’t use the desktop version of BO, we have to use the web tool.  I re-iterate:  ack gasp barf.

So what once required only an ODBC connection and some of my very own SQL statements now requires:

1. Using a generic report available to the entire campus.
2. Which can be changed at a moments’ notice.
3. Without any warning.
4. So I have to open a web browser.
5. …run the report…
6. …Then save to a local machine as an Excel spreadsheet.
7. (Though no doubt I could do the same via code, assuming they didn’t upgrade BO and change the layout and the commands and the name of the report and…)
8. Then my code has to open the spreadsheet…
9. …Run a query that collects only the data I need…
10. …massage that data so the format is correct…
11. …and insert that data into a table in my local database so that my users can see data from the accounting system side by side with data from our work order management system for reconciliation purposes.  All of which is a major pain, and I wish we didn’t need this reconciliation stuff, but due to a particular decision two years ago, we’re stuck with two systems that we need to ensure are both showing the same numbers.

(FYI:  The direct link?  I could do 9, 10, and 11, and be done.)

Dudes.  This sucks dead toads.  Not only did I find out yesterday that they changed the column names at some point in the past, so my code that queries the spreadsheet downloaded from the web doesn’t work anymore (hey, no errors–it just doesn’t insert any data, because the column I was querying on doesn’t exist any more).  But today I find out that a transaction detail report that previously showed revenue figures suddenly just ignores any revenue and dumps a zero in instead.  Because, hey, we’re a university and nobody gets revenue, right?  Har, har, think again.

Dudes.  This really sucks dead toads.

And nowhere…nowhere…in all of this was there any kind of warning that the report had been changed.  None.  Nowhere.

Gah.  Gimme back my direct link, dammit.  We can see all this stuff just fine using the accounting system’s web interface (ack gack, another web interface, slow and ponderous and irritating as hell), one transaction at a time, so it’s not like we shouldn’t be seeing the info to start with.  But Kozmik All forbid anyone should want to actually do something with that information, or see multiple transactions, or, or, or…

Grumble, grumble, grumble.  I’m going to be talking to the DW folks to see if we can have them create us a specific-to-our-department report.  What a pain.  They’ve got months‘ worth of reports to create…any request from us could take months to do.  Maybe I’ll try to learn more about BO and create my own report.  Even if it took me months, it would be less time.

Grumble.

A lot of the cool kids are doing bullet-style posts recently.  Since most of them are doing NaBloPoMo, they get a pass from me because the daily posting drains the creative well dry very quickly.

I, on the other hand, am doing a bullet-style post because I’m just plain lazy.  No NaBloPoMo excuse from me, as I’m not participating.

• It’s 4:00.  The sun is setting in a few minutes.  The sun rose today at 9:10 or thereabouts.  According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, we’re supposed to have 7 hours and 17 minutes of sunlight today.  Well, yeah, I suppose we did.  There were no clouds, so we saw the sun today.  That was nice.  But the maximum altitude of the sun hereabouts was 10 degrees.  Ten.  Sort of like having sunset all day.
• I don’t care that Hilary Clinton had someone planted in her audience lob her a planted question meant to point out some of her stands on certain issues.
• I equally don’t care that FEMA had a plant in their audience at a press conference to ask questions guaranteeing that a few things got mentioned.
• I further don’t care that John McCain didn’t lambast one of his supporters when she asked, “How do we beat the bitch?” when talking about Hilary Clinton.  I thought “Can someone translate that for me?” was a perfectly good way of saying, “Yo!  That’s not nice!”
• I’m afraid to open our gas bill.  I don’t want to know what a month’s worth of heating costs, especially given that it will be much higher in the next few months.
• Context is important to me.  If a person writes an article in which she makes a comment to her adopted daughter that could indicate she has a savior complex and thinks China is a land of indentured orphans, I’d like to know what kind of relationship she has with her daughter.  If it’s one kind of relationship, it’s an in-joke about what some people say about adoption; if it’s a different kind of relationship, it’s snide and insensitive and denigrating.  Given the remainder of the article, I lean towards the former…but a helluva lot of folks in the blog world are leaning towards the latter and a kerfuffle has ensued.
• On the other hand, if angry comments on the article coming from adult adoptees were censored, that sucks.  In my read of the article yesterday, though, it looked like many of the originally censored comments were in.  ?  I don’t know.
• Thanksgiving is next week.  How the hell did that happen?!  It’s far too soon.
• And that means Christmas isn’t far behind.
• My carefully crafted code to dive into the “raw data” from a downloaded web report was foiled–foiled!–when the people who created the report went and changed the column names on the raw data tab of that report.  Grrr.  Now I have to do some figuring on how to check those column names beforehand, and have to stash them in a table so that the next time they decide to get fancy with column names, we’ll be able to catch it right away, instead of wondering for a few weeks why no new data was being imported.  Let me just say:  Duh, OmegaMom.  On the other hand, why the hell did the folks change those column names?  Raw data=stuff that gets used somewhere.  Not raw data=stuff that you can fiddle with all you want.  Or at least let people know with a popup the next time they cruise your web reports.
• Boots, snowpants, and snowgloves arrived yesterday from LandsEnd.  OmegaDotter is happy.  Winter parka is back-ordered.
• Will discuss way-kewl interfaces tomorrow.  And way-kewl prosthetic devices the day after.  Or maybe combine the two.

I said at the tail end of yesterday’s post that I had thought of, but discarded, the idea of doing a post based on “Teenage Wasteland”.

I have reconsidered.  I pulled that post idea out of the dustbin.

Please.  Please.  PUH-leeze tell me that almost-six-year-olds are demons sent to earth to torment us?  Please.

I love my darling OmegaDotter.  I really, truly do.

But y’know what?  Awful confession time:  Right now, I just don’t like being with her.

She is:  snotty.  Whiny.  Snippy.  Tantrummy.  Rude.  Disrespectful.  Mean.  Self-centered.  Sassy.

Just plain horrid.

Like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead…”When she was good, she was very, very good.  But when she was bad…

“She was horrid.”

She is being so horrid that even OmegaDad, in whose eyes she can (generally) do no wrong, has decided that she is whiny, sassy, mean, rude, disrespectful, etc.

I find myself thinking that we have utterly failed.  That we’ve raised a hellion.  A brat.  That we should never have been entrusted with raising a child, because we’re obviously so bad at it.

The worst of it?  Is that, apparently, she’s just a doll at school and at before/after school care.  She saves all this shit for us.  Bah.

Okay, it seems worst because it’s hurtful.  It’s actually not worst, because at least she’s not behaving like a snotty little brat with the rest of the world.

Then Ms. Hyde disappears for a while and Dr. Jekyll reappears, and all is sweetness and light and fun and pleasant.  She hands me notes that say, “To Mommy, Love OmegaDotter”, and that have little “I ♥ you”s scattered about.  She glows at me when she is done with her gymnastics class.  She sings silly songs at me when we’re driving from OmegaDad’s office to her before-school place.  She draws and builds elaborate creations.  Bit by bit, she’s reading.  She can make us laugh like crazy.

And then Ms. Hyde reappears.

My only hope is that I can recall a few younger relatives who were absolute pills at the age of five or six, and who have turned out to be model citizens and fairly nice all-around human beings as adults.

So there I was, schlepping down to the office after getting something from upstairs, and I notice something dark in the backyard.

Lo and behold, it’s this:

Yes, Virginia, there are moose in the great Alaskan suburban wilds!

Now, Virginia, we need to discuss digital camera settings.

I kept wondering why, why were my pictures so blurry?  Was I shaking with excitement?  Was it just cold?  Are my eyes becoming so bad, so quickly?  And then I happened to notice that the digicam was set on “Scene”.

Please, Virginia, tell me what on earth the “scene” setting on digicams is good for?  Just a clue??  All it does it give you blurry pictures.  Gah!

And tell me why, Virginia, it’s so damned easy to switch settings on digicams from “auto” or “portrait” to that useless “scene” setting?

Do any of my illustrious readers actually use the “scene” setting?

Of course, by the time I realized the pics were blurry as the result of that setting, the moose had wandered on, and were tormenting neighbors’ dogs by simply existing.

Okay.  We have a new house.  I need to decorate.  I have some very specific ideas.

Apparently, my very specific ideas are out of step with the home improvement fashion industry–or perhaps the fashion industry in general.

After all, I think baby-doll tops are too, too ’70s for words.  And they make every woman who wears them look pregnant or fat.  Have you looked at any apparel stores lately?  Tell me what you see.  (Blog reader, blog reader, what do you see?  I see baby dolls surrounding me…)  Let’s put it this way:  last year, there were no baby doll tops.  This year, it seems there is nothing else.

No, I’m not planning to decorate the house in baby doll tops.  But the proliferation of BDTs is a symptom of what I’m about to complain about.

Each of those BDTs is brown.  Or muddy green.  Or a kind of putrid pumpkin orange.  Or a dim blue.  Or a combination of any or all of the above.

It’s well-known that at the beginning of the fashion year, planning a year out, an elite group of sorcerers psychics gurus madmen fashion color consultants meets to decide what are going to be the in and trendy colors next year.

I read an article about this meeting, and these consultants claim (apparently with a straight face) that they are not dictating the colors to be used, they are predicting, based on current trends, what colors will be popular.

You will not be surprised to find that OmegaMom finds this a truly hilarious concept.  OmegaMom is firmly in the camp of conspiratorial thinkers who despise the color psychotics fashion color consultants because she thinks they are a portion of the Illuminati Conspiracy To Rule The World And Crush Free Thinking.

Anyway, there I am, wanting to decorate, with some very specific ideas and colors in mind.  Are any of the colors I am interested in available?  Or the designs?  Hah.  No, what is available is the 2007 version of the ubiquitous avocado and mustard.  Dim, murky colors.  Gloomy.  Dark.  Bah.

I was able to find some lovely bright colors for our bedroom.  We’re going to paint it light sage and splash all this color around.

We found the (ugh) pale pink for the dotter’s bedroom, but trying to find, say, pink curtains is an exercise in futility…well, okay, I can find pink sheer curtains.  Whoop-de-damned-do.  I’m not going to put sheers on these windows, if you please; come next July, that kind of insanity would dump us all into the nuthouse ASAP.

But.  Bright colors for towels?  Nope.  And, having decided to indulge my girly-girl side with a little frill and frippery, my search for lavender and pink towels, plus a fabric shower curtain with flowers that are lavender and pink, has come to naught.

I went looking at sofas today.  Every damned piece of furniture at the store was dark.  Dark wood.  Dark sheets.  Dark sofa upholstery.  Dark brown and gold and green rugs.

Bah.  Picture OmegaMom muttering dire curses and shaking her fist at the cabal of fashion color consultants (servants of the Illuminati).

I realize that you have been working in your business field for many years.  I know that, when one has been doing the same work for a long time, the details of that work are ingrained in the brain, to the point where one begins to speak a kind of shorthand or jargon and knows the procedures by heart.

But please do remember that some of us are not in your profession.  We have professions of our own, and have learned the shorthand and jargon of our own profession.  Our procedures are totally different than yours.  We do not possess amazing telepathic powers that enable us to grok your procedures and know, intuitively, that you need specific documents at specific times.  We sort of trust you to let us know.

Therefore, for instance, some of us do not realize that when you say, “Please have so-and-so email me an estimate of the down payment and closing costs”, you mean the very same Good Faith Estimate that has been sitting in the Shoebox’s living room for two weeks now.  Some of us think that people in other professions have arcane knowledge and procedures of their very own, and that the Good Faith Estimate gracing our files is not what you are looking for, but that you are looking for something like an “Official Relocation Down Payment Estimate” or some other impressively titled form.  We would have been more than happy to fax that very same document to you two weeks ago if we had known that was what you wanted.

(We won’t get into the question of why, when you’ve got so-and-so’s email address, you can’t just–amazing concept–email him yourself, requesting that information.  Or, if that’s illegal, unethical, immoral, or Just Not Done, explaining that in a nice paragraph that says, “I would email him myself, but we are not allowed to by Subsection C Paragraph 3 Subparagraph a of state regulations/federal regulations/relocation company association’s code of ethics.”  Of course, so-and-so is doing the exact same thing from his end.)

(We also won’t get into the question of why it takes six weeks for two completed house appraisals to wend their way through the bowels of your company to the point that someone finally produces an official offer which required maybe one minute of calculation, on letterhead and in contract form.  I was able to ascertain that the two appraisals were within 5% of each other just by looking at the numbers, and was also able to get the average of the two appraisals within seconds, so it’s not like it was Real Hard Work.  If it had taken less time, perhaps we wouldn’t now be needing to deal with the insurance company to get estimates and repairs for the water damage from the Great Huge Storm, but you would.)

Sincerely,  A customer who is just snarking in general

The Good News:  Our stuff is out of the moving van and in the house.  We will be able to visit our stuff now and then, and maybe sit on the floor for a while and look around and realize that there’s SPACE that will soon be ours.  YAYAYAYAY!!!!

We can’t, however, “move in”, because we have to wait until the day after closing for the sale to be recorded.  Apparently, unlike other states we’ve been in where closing day is the day you take official possession, here in the Final Frontier you can’t take official possession until it’s recorded.  I am going to ask our realtor here if, since our insurance takes effect on the 10th and potential insurance claims was the argument against early occupancy, maybe we could sneak in on the 10th, rather than the 11th.

Anyway, I think (think) everything is a Go for closing on the 10th.  Cross your fingers.

There haven’t been any earthquakes or volcano eruptions.

The dotter is in school.

OmegaDad likes his job.

I’ve got a job.

My ticker, though still giving me twinges now & then, is essentially healthy.

“This, too, shall pass…”

I’m not going to think about the moving van that we tried to head off at the pass this morning, because the sellers are still moving out and we can’t move our stuff in.  We’ll deal with the “missed delivery” charges later.  Surely they can’t be too huge, right?

I’m not going to think about the Great Huge Storm that hit Small Mountain University Town last weekend that swamped Small Mountain University and, incidentally, leaked through the roof in our house back in SMUT, damages unknown but requiring repair, thus eating away at our equity.  All of which we found out about this morning.

I’m not going to think about a closing date that has been moved to the 10th, and the associated pay-through-the-nose costs for staying in the Shoebox for another week.

Not any more, at least.  You aren’t hearing me sobbing or screaming, “AAAIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!“, nope.  (GrannyJ did, however.)

So, instead, I’ll think about “self-esteem” and teaching kids to sing, “I am special, I am special, yes, I am!  Yes, I am!  There is no-one like me, there is no-one like me, hmm, hmm, hmm” to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star Frére Jacques.  (I can’t remember the concluding phrase, and don’t feel like asking the dotter to sing it yet again.)  And then I’ll write about my problems with that particular approach to self-esteem tomorrow.

Lizard noted that the words didn’t scan at all with Twinkle, Twinkle.  I was puzzled, singing them over and over again–the words fit just fine!  Then I realized that I had the wrong song entirely.  Dur.

Good on ya, mates, you came through quite nicely!  Plenty of ideas to tide me over until something in the news piques my interest.

Now to figure out where to start.  Where to start, where to start…

Dirk asks:

Hey, that’s what AmFam just did… is this national “ask the blogger a question” week?

Yup, I shamelessly stole the “Ask me some questions!  Please!  I’m desperate!” directly from AmFam; it worked for her, so it had to work for me a bit, too.

Why do you use blogger and not one of the other blogging tools?

Because I’m lazy and cheap.  And because, when all my internet buds leaped on the blogging bandwagon, and I, lemming-like, followed them, they were all on Blogger.  So I went there.  It was quick, it was easy, it was painless, and I could concentrate on writing.

When I started posting on a regular basis, I soon realized that Blogger was, at best, a flawed tool.  But it was still cheap–in other words, free!  And there were all these free templates, and I could fiddle with the HTML to customize the templates.  When I looked at other freebies, I either didn’t like them enough, or I discovered, as at WordPress.com, that they strictly limited any fiddling, they only had six templates, and they didn’t allow any other templates.  Bah.

Then there was wind of BloggerBeta, and I waited, and waited, and waited to get an invite to switch over so I could take advantage of labeling and a few other things they claimed would be there.  Then I got the invite, and tried to switch over.

Bahahahaha!

Let me just say that my blog is too complex (har!) for BloggerBeta.  I was stuck in Blogger-to-BloggerBeta limbo for quite a while.  Any time I logged in, it prompted me to switch over.  I’d try to switch over and would get an error message saying that I had tried previously, and there was an error, and they’d let me know when it was time to switch over.  I’d log in again, and there would be that same “switch to Blogger Beta” message. Over and over and over again.

Many people in that same situation have been unable to post at all.

I, however, overcame both some of the limitations of Blogger and got around the limbo by using LiveWriter.  It’s basic, but it has some nice features:  I can blog offline; I can have a WYSIWYG view of my blogging as I write–in other words, it has grabbed my css and layout, and when I write a post, it looks almost exactly what it will look like when I publish and get online (yay!); and it lets me do bold and italic and underlining and strikethrough and colored fonts and numbered or unnumbered lists and blockquotes and weblinks (SBird, here’s how!) with a click of the button; AND it let me post to my limbo-ized blog until I could finally figure out how to get the attention of someone in Blogger support who un-limboized me.

That said, I dearly want to move over to a hosted solution, with my Very Own Domain.  I’ve found a good place, and am planning to move over, using WordPress, with my own personalized template which I am very comfy with.

Why do you post so few pictures?

Well.  Hm.  Sometimes I do a picture post, usually after the dotter and I have gone somewhere and I’ve gotten lots of pics.  But I have some reservations.

First off, there are Weird Folks on the web.  Some of the WFs take little girls’ pictures and w@nk off to them, the idea of which just creeps me out.  Of course, there’s nothing I can do about it, and there may be, for all I know, folks who have already downloaded her pics and are–right now!–”doing it”.  Ew.  I have decided not to post a few pics of her especially because of this issue, some very cute pictures, that I just don’t want creeps messing with.

Then there are the WFs who like to take other people’s pictures (and posts, and sometimes entire blogs!) and pass them off as their own.  WTF?  So far, when I search on phrases from my blog, I haven’t found them.  But I do know of a few cases where someone’s entire blog was plaigiarized. 

Doing pics is a pain sometimes.  You have to download them from the camera.  You have to crop them and resize them.  You have to upload them to a photo-hosting service (or your website if you’re on a hosted site).  Then…then…you can put them into your blog. 

I waffle on the privacy issue.  Somewhere along the line, OmegaDotter will turn into a teenager, and be all bristly and touchy about odd things.  She may decide that my blog is okay so long as I disguise stuff…she may think it’s okay to post pics of her, she may not…

And then there’s the fact that sometimes I’m writing about stuff that I don’t have pictures of…like, say, cute little four-celled embryos.  I could always “borrow” them, but if I do, I like to give full credit–a link to the giving site, a person’s name if I can find it.  Sometimes I forget.  Eeek!

More later.  See how easy it is for me to spew words out if there’s a focus?  You guys have generously given me days–maybe weeks!–worth of posts.  Yay!

Technorati: Q&A, Blogger, Live Writer, pictures

I am throwing myself upon my readers’ mercy.  My brain is a blank, and has been for days.  Ask me some questions.  Suggest a topic.  Help!