When I Was Young

When I was kid this was one of my favorite landmarks. This rock was huge and used as prop for a hotdog stand. The other side had a sad face.

But what I loved about it was that seeing it meant we were almost to Candlewood Lake Park. I spent many a contented summer day here.

This was the public swimming place and if memory serves you had to buy a season pass to get in. It was a colored metal pin, and as a resident student you got a good discount. Even with the worth of money in those days, it was cheap.

Back in the day, there were two floats offshore, called appropriately enough, the big float and the little float. One had a high diving board and the other either had a low board or a slide. Maybe my sister will remember. [Photo thanks to Marc A. Catone]

A good reminder

Embrace life. I swear this PSA almost made me cry. It definitely gave me goosebumps.



[Via Josh Levin at CNN]

When I was young

This guy was in front of a gem shop not too far from the house where I grew up. As I recall, the shop sold fossils too. The last time I went there, I was a teenager. I couldn't afford a fossil, but I bought a couple of polished gemstones for about 25 cents. Of all the things I've lost along the way, I still have those. I hear the shop and the Pink Dino are long gone. [Photo thanks to Marc A. Catone]

In other news it's a beautiful day in the little city. The daffodils are still sprouting and I see something that looks like iris popping up. Even more exciting, a couple of lilies just broke through the ground. Won't be long before the little city busts out all over in flowers.

This and that

Sorry, I've been down for the last couple of days with some kind of stomach bug so posting is still off and I haven't dealt with the upgrade. But here's something I ran across that seems very useful. A modified form of CPR that doesn't require mouth to mouth.



And this is really cheery. I can't figure out how to embed the video, but there's a livestream webcam here of a hummingbird nest with a baby bird in it. (Scroll down a bit to get to the video screen. Loads a little slowly but worth the wait.)

And this amazed me. The pictures at this link look like they were taken in real life, but it's actually a minature city that this guy built. If you scroll through the page, you can see how it's done. Incredible detail.

The Little City

Hit a snag in customizing the template. It seems I have to upgrade it one more time to use the customize feature and will lose any changes to the HTML so I'm holding off on restoring the sidebar. For the moment, here's one more shot of my little city. This is a ruin on the edge of town. A door to nowhere.

On the bright side, I've figured out how to upload photos in this new interface. So there's that.

No turning back now

Okay. I changed the template. No changing my mind. The old format is gone and so it that ugly code at the top, so there's that. As I feared, there's no way to save the old comments from Haloscan so they're lost and I'm going to miss them. Obviously, I still have to customize the template quite a bit to get back the links and other sidebar stuff. But I nearly had a nervous breakdown finally clicking on the "change this blog forever" button, so I think I'll work on that in stages. At the moment, my photo upload button seems to have disappeared so I'm glad I posted my Valentine first.

Anyway, what do you think? I hated all the templates but this was the one I hated the least. I liked the formatting on this one the best and I'm planning to change some of the colors I think. Not really fond of the dark ones on the sidebar. I suppose we'll all get used to it. At least I didn't lose the URL addy, so there's that as well.

Happy Valentine's Day

I love you all my dear friends and readers. If you have a sweetie, hope you have a lovely celebration and if you don't, well then -- be mine!


AND, a Happy Chinese New Year. If you're doing the dinner thing, it would be a good year to go to your local Asian restaurant. [graphic via]

Ready for Spring

We got another couple of inches of snow on Friday night. I woke up yesterday and it looked like this:


It's mostly gone already but it's still way too cold to be calling this place "the south." On the bright side, we have two daffodils bravely getting ready to bloom at the edge of the porch. They should be open in a couple of more days.

Meanwhile, I've been obsessing about upgrading the template. Spent a couple of hours checking it out and I'm a bit terrified to go through with it. I hate the new templates and the "easy" interface looks complicated. I'm freaked that I'm going to lose everything, but even though we still miraculously seem to have Haloscan comments working, that won't last forever and I really want to get rid of that ugly code on top. Going to work up my courage and just do it this afternoon. Keep your fingers crossed...

No Snow in the Little City

Looks like we'll just be getting rain here today but if you're missing the excitement of being snowed in, this is a seriously cool time lapse video of DC.



[via] Poor little teddy bear...

No Snowpocalyse

I got an urgent robocall from the little city saying to be prepared for a 72 hour power outage. We were supposed to get a big ice storm and so I duly battled the crowds at the grocery store to lay in supplies. I got out my candles. I got books to read from the library. I even bought a bag of kitty litter for the car in case I had to go out and got stuck on ice.

Of course, we got nothing. It was little sleety yesterday morning but that soon turned to rain and it didn't ice the roads last night that I can see. Traffic seems to be moving at its usual pace. There are few flurries out there right now, so maybe we'll still get something, but it looks like the big prize winners are north of us. Got a slow start in DC but I don't think anyone is laughing now. I'm hearing they already have a foot of snow.

Meanwhile, at some point in the next 24 hours, I'm going to get brave and upgrade the template so I can switch over to Blogger comments, since Haloscan going to officially die in a few days. So if the blog disappears for a little while, don't give up on me. I'm going to keep the same URL and see how much I lose in the archives. Hoping it will just be the comments, and I think they'll disappear anyway when Haloscam goes. [graphic]

Fever - 1958

Love this song. Peggy Lee was brilliant.

Somebody's in Trouble

This YouTube is hilarious. Look at the guy in the background on the left behind the man speaking in this Australian news clip. He's looking at nudie pictures, apparently not realizing his computer is visible on camera.



Not to worry. It's safe for work. You can't really see the pix that well. [hat tip Susie Madrak]

Groundhog Day

Don't care what that hog Phil has to say in Pennsylvania. He always sees his stupid shadow because there are so many lights from all the tv cameras. Pagans call this day Candlemas and here's the real omen.

“If Candlemas is bright and clear,
There’ll be two winters in the year;
If Candlemas brings snow and rain,
Old winter shall not come again.”

It's pouring rain here today. Yeah for an early spring.

Don't throw away that clicker just yet

This is possibly the most useful thing I've run across in a long time. I know I've thrown away more than one clicker when replacing the batteries didn't make it work. I'm told this this method for fixing a dead remote has worked for at least one person. Worth a try if you're in that situation.

And as long as I'm posting random links, here's some photo galleries to check out. The full "wolf moon" from all corners of the world.

Wonders of nature and waterfall shots. Also really like this photo blog. And this is a very cool crazy cube optical illusion.