Cat Yodeling

Um.  I do the “semi-automatic kissing machine” thing with Emily, but it doesn’t seem to annoy her.

Procrastination

This made me laugh out loud when I saw it on the ADD forum I belong to.

Blew it again . . .

I blew NaBloPoMo again.  Was sick last night and went to bed at an ungodly early hour and slept through the night.  Then I remembered this morning that I’d not even thought about blogging.

Sigh.

Crap.

Over-40 Eyesight

Last weekend, my friend RB and I met up at a bookstore.  We looked at several books (even bought some from the clearance bins), and sat in the coffee shop and chatted.  

I discovered that jalapeno potato chips and mocha latte are really good together, but I digress.

When we went up front to check out, RB looked at the rack of bookmarks and said she used to have a bookmark that was a thin, plastic, rectangular magnifying “glass”.  We both have Over-40 Eyesight, so I was able to appreciate how helpful that would be.  She said she’d lost it and was hoping to find another one.  The closest thing she was able to find was a two-pack of credit-card sized plastic magnifiers.  She took it from the display and looked for a price, but it was printed so small, she had to take another package from the display and use another magnifier to read the price of the magnifiers.

Did I mention before that I love irony?

We decided to split the cost and share the two-pack.

When she said that she suspected that her other one was somewhere in her car, and then pointed out that it might be futile to try to look for something flat and see-through, in a car, with Over-40 Eyesight, I mentioned that if it’s on the floor, she might just look for pieces of carpet lint that appear to be unnaturally large.

Shopping Lists

My therapist, when I asked her to talk about some ADD-coping strategies a month ago, suggested, among other things, that I keep a shopping list.  Not just to make one from memory, right before I go to the store, but to keep one that I add onto whenever I realize there is something else I need.  (This was after I talked about having forgotten to buy laundry detergent over and over, when I’d gone to the store serveral times for other things.  Did you know that shampoo works pretty well in a pinch, for washing clothes?)

Anyway, I have a little notebook that I carry in my purse, and I started to use it as a running shopping list, and it has begun to double as a small to-do list as well, for the more immediate to-do items, like errands to run or phone calls to make during my lunch break.  It’s serving two purposes, and that’s nice.  It’s also a better solution than having little scraps of paper in my purse, that I can’t find when I need them.

My friend RB and I saw a very amusing book about shopping lists last weekend when we went to the bookstore.  I’m so funny about other people seeing my shopping lists, whether because of my embarrssment about my hard-to-read writing or the way I may abbreviate things or put question marks next to an item that I may not need all that badly unless it happens to be on sale or enough other items are on sale to “make it fit” into the budget.  But the shopping lists in this book are so funny (be sure to click on the “Look Inside” link to see some of them) that mine now seem boring enough that I don’t have to care who sees them.

The thing is, though, for me, other than occasionally forgetting to buy something repeatedly (like the laundry soap), on my better days (and if I need only a handful of items), I’m usually pretty able to remember what I need.  On my bad days, I may not even be able to construct a list at all if I haven’t been slowly adding to it for days, let alone navigate the grocery store or decide what to buy without a list.  But the good days . . . they’re fun.  They’re fun because I like to use creative ways to remember what I need to buy, such as arranging the items in my mind so that I know them based on the first letter of each word (“I need three B’s, two L’s, and an H”), or I may arrange them so that there is a silly rhyme scheme (“Soap, shampoo, and wine, and tomatoes-on-the-vine”).  Sometimes the syllable-pattern reminds me of a song, as it did the other day, even if it happens to be a song I’d never paid all that much attention to.  I was walking toward the store and reached for my purse to get the list out, and I thought to myself, “No, wait.  The syllable-pattern reminded me of ‘Lawyers, Guns, and Money‘.”

And it came to me quickly: Toothpaste, cheese, and butter.

I could write a Weird Al song, if only I’d needed liver, buns, and honey.

People tell me all the time that my mind works very differently from most others.  I guess they’re right.

Trying NaBloPoMo Again . . . And A Headscratcher

I decided to give NaBloPoMo another try.  This time, I set my Google Calendar to email me with daily reminders so I won’t forget like I did that one day in April that was the beginning of blowing it, for me, for the month.

*   *   *

When I saw my stats today, my mouth fell open.  I checked my statcounter account because my WordPress stats didn’t really show anything to explain the huge jump in traffic.  My statcounter account, unfortunately, always says “No referring link” and won’t show search words.  It did, however, show that my blog was visited by computers at several schools or Department of Education offices in various US states, plus two locations in Canada and two in the UK.  The search words showing in my WordPress stats have been mostly about “funny” stuff, cartoons, and lolcats for two days straight.  I did use the word “education” as a tag for my “How Can You Say This Differently?” post on April 26th, but I’m not seeing that as a search word, and so far there is only one incoming link showing from the WordPress Dashboard, where someone may have followed the “education” tag.  And the school-related visits are all to my main Front Page, not to a specific entry.  

I’m scratching my head on this one.

So far today, in addition to many visits from other ISP’s, between 07:45:51 AM and 02:41:46 PM (not quite 7 hours), I have had visits from the following school- or state-related ISP’s:

Johnston County Schools, North Carolina (US)
Northeast Ohio Network For Education Technology, Ohio (US)
Sevier-school-district-3644, Tennessee (US)
Cumbria And Lancashire Education Online, Workington, Cumbria (UK)
Orange County Public Schools, Florida (US)
Durham Public School, North Carolina (US)
Toronto Catholic School Board, Toronto, Ontario (Canada)
Arkansas Public School Computer Network, Arkansas (US)
Sherburne-earlville-school, New York (US)
Liberty University, Virginia (US)
Racine-unified-school-district, Wisconsin (US)
Cumbria Lancashire Education Online, Poulton, Blackpool (UK)
State Of Nebraska / Office Of The Cio, Nebraska (US)
Broward County Public Schools, Florida (US)
Ohio Mid Eastern Regional Education Service Agency, Ohio (US)
Bolton Public Schools, Connecticut (US)
Amphitheater Public Schools, Arizona (US)
University Of Toronto, Ontatio (Canada)
Georgia Department Of Education, Georgia (US)
Northside Independent School District, Texas (US)
Widener University, Pennsylvania (US)
Education Service Center Region 12 , Texas (US)
San Diego County Office Of Education, California (US)
Albany Schoharie Schenectady Boces, New York (US)
Lee County Schools, Florida (US)
Clackamas Education Service District, Oregon (US)
Wv Department Of Education, West Virginia (US)
Union Public Schools, Oklahoma (US)
Washington School Information Processing Cooperation, Washington (US)
Erie 1 Boces, New York (US)
Boaz City Schools, Alabama (US)
Poultney High School, Vermont (US)
State Of Arkansas (US)
Utah Education Network, Utah (US)
Mobile County Public School System, Alabama (US)
Berryessa Union School District, California (US)
Indiana Department Of Education, Indiana (US)
New Milford Schools, New Jersey (US)
Wyoming Higher Education Computer Network, Wyoming (US)
Monroe #1 Boces, New York (US)
Heartland Area Education Agency 11, Iowa (US)
Contra Costa County Office Of Education, California (US)
City Of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (US)
Education Service Center, Texas (US)
U.s. Department Of State, Washington DC (US) – This visitor clicked my “Television” category

These are my search terms so far for today:

funny

funny pictures

funny pics

funny images

funny cats and dogs

awesome cats with funny writing

funny pic

lolcats love

funny many cats

funny dogs and cats

i can has cheezeburger cats

funny+cats+and+dogs

funny mothers day cats

funny photos

get out of my office kitten

funny shit

2009 funny

colors that go with brown pants

funny
funny pictures
funny pics
funny images
funny cats and dogs
awesome cats with funny writing
funny pic
lolcats love
funny many cats
funny dogs and cats
i can has cheezeburger cats
funny+cats+and+dogs
funny mothers day cats
funny photos
get out of my office kitten
funny shit
2009 funny
colors that go with brown pants

Is there a multi-school project today involving funny animal pictures?  I can’t imagine that many people are questioning their color-coordinating fashion skills.

Just because I am so curious now, if you have reached my blog from a school or a Department of Education office, can you please either comment or email me (lifeischangeblog [at] gmail [dot] com) and let me know how you found me?  Thanks!