A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it'll annoy enough people to make it worth the effort!

The other day all I wanted to do was ride my horse. I was in not the world's best mood, n it was bright n sunny out, n I figure go ride n the world will be well. Get to the barn pick up Si's foot, n she basically collapses in xties. hmmmm def not good. Go check the other leg to find out *why* she couldn't stand on it. No heat, no swelling... But the poor dear lost a shoe. Came off clean so there's really no excuse, but I guess being a chestnut mare there had to be *some* princess in her somewhere. Took her out to lunge her -- not bad, but def not 100%. So Si gets the day off. N my day failed to get any better. Esp as I, of course, could not find the shoe anywhere (funny when other people lose them I generally have no prob finding them, but finding them for *my* horse??? Well that's just not going to happen). AND my superstar farrier (who really is freakin' brilliant AND really fast about reattaching lost shoes) is away this week :( Booooo.... Classic timing. So I'm grounded till he gets home. So sad.

So our staff at work is absolutely swamped at the moment. Good for business, but absolutely insane for scheduling. Anyways, one of our clients needed a simple change made. Designers are all busy, change has to get done, therefore I have to find a way to do it. hahaha gotta admit I'm really enjoying the random challenges of the "know a little bit about everything" requirement of my job :) So sure enough get to learn *more* design software, n yes it prob took more of the designer's time answering my million and one "quick question"s than it would've taken them to actually do the job (sad but true) but the theory is next time it won't take any of their time and the job can still get done. AND I get to play w/ fun pictures for part of the day :) hahaha DID manage to pull it off and get sign-off on it (yeah me!) - which admittedly required no design skills whatsoever, but hey may as well set the bar low for first attempts eh? I don't ask Si to jump 4' (yet :) why should I?

Of course the one skill it'd be *really* handy for me to know is Flash. That sets the bar a little higher *g*. But we'll see. I have a tutorial book -- is that a good start? We won't mention that I randomly borrowed it from one of the developers who could probably write it! hahaha

hmmm so it turns out one needs power for a toaster oven to work. I don't understand unplugging the toaster. Esp just once in a blue moon. People I lived w/ in VT used to do that randomly too. Drives me insane. Esp as you can't see the plug to know if it's unplugged, so you put your toast in, n it just never toasts. The oven's even worse cause the timer works w/o power so you hear it ticking, it dings that your breakfast is ready, and... sore disappointment. Not such a good start to the day. Ok end of rant >;-P

Yeah so I totally had to go look up the origins of "once in a blue moon" -- I'm such a geek. And now I have to admit I'm a rather disappointed geek since blue moons aren't really all that rare. However, they are more rare than my toaster episodes have been of late! hahaha anyways since I *know* some of you are now thinking, yeah, what IS a blue moon? (if only cause my train of thought led you there - sorry bout that :) I thought I'd share... *dramatic pause* a blue moon is an "extra" full moon -- technically defined as a season having 4 rather than 3 full moons (in which the 3rd of the 4 is the "blue moon"), in pop culture it's defined as more than one in a month. Since our calendar doesn't exactly match the lunar cycles (it's off by approx 11 days) the extra days add up so that every 2-3 years there's an extra one (2.71722874 years to be exact *g* It's important to be exact. Or so they tell me. "They" being so exact after all :). And for the excessively curious, the next pop-culture one will occur Dec 31/09 -- making for some great New Year's Eve parties I'm sure! hahaha There is a way more fun, and way more rare, interpretation that "blue moon" is when the moon is literally blue. Which happens, well once in a blue moon >;-P Ok ok, apparently it's caused by excessive smoke, dust, etc and happens occasionally due to forest fires or volcanic eruptions. But, me doing the whole medieval lit thing, my fav note on the whole Blue Moon phenomenon was regarding the earliest usage; it occurred in a pamphlet bashing the English clergy (a dangerous hobby at that time) -- ""Yf they say the mone is belewe / We must believe that it is true" (aka: If they say the moon is blue, we must believe that it is true). As in we're expected to believe the ridiculous just cause you say it's true??? But then, apparently he'd never looked at the moon after a forest fire >;-P

Don't you feel smarter now? I tell ya, some day that will appear on Jeopardy and you'll really impress your friends :) Cause we all know Jeopardy is such a social event >;-P

Had to laugh at an overheard conversation the other day. An automated telemarketer called the office and the guy who answered the phone put it on speaker. It said something about "press 1 to lower your credit", which he did, and then got a real live person w/ the epitomic female telemarketer voice who asked "Did you press one to lower your credit?" (seriously! hahaha I've never done this so I admit I was surprised by the stupidity of the greeting but ok). Anyways, we are on the do-not-call list, and have asked *many* times politely to be removed from the list. I figured this was where we were going again. However, he'd clearly had enough and was admittedly less-than-polite in his request that they not call here anymore before slamming down the phone. But seconds after slamming down the phone we hear "well I'm just going to call you back." (again delivered in complete sing-song telemarketer voice) hahaha sure enough, when on speaker, you don't hang up by well hanging up, you hang up by pushing the "rls" button *g* -- but that made for a more entertaining conversation. "What?" asked after some sputtering and stunned looks at the living phone and realizing about the hang-up button. "I'm going to call you back." "Well why would you do that?" by this time his tone is bemused rather than annoyed. "Well I always call back anybody who's rude to me." "You know we don't want your product, why would you waste your time? Your company's time? My time? My company's time?" "Well I have nothing better to do." At which point the peanut gallery joined in with "that is so sad." and the poor woman gave up and ended the conversation. But seriously "I have nothing better to do???" Where's that "this call may be monitored" feature when you need it eh? N how sad would it be that the only highlight to your job is that you have nothing important enough to do so you can waste time antagonizing people who've been rude to you?

So today I'm at my office, have to take a screen shot and send it to the client. NP -- hit print screen and away you go right? Yeah -- except what happens when there's no "print screen" button on the keyboard. Sheesh. Tried a few random key combos, but eventually gave up on that one and waited for one of the designers to get in. "How do you take screen shots?" (don't I feel like an idiot having to ask that)... "Oh all you have to do is cmd_shift_4_space." Uh sure. Why didn't I come up w/ that?!?!? Sheesh. >;-P hahaha made me feel better about not getting it on my own. On the plus side though, mac has some very kewl screen-shot toys that now that I know the magic buttons for will make life much easier, but still, for something that gets used a LOT by a wide variety of people, you'd think it'd have slightly more user-friendly accessibility.