Colleen over at Simple Kind of Life has made so much cash blogging for PayPerPost that she's giving stuff away now. That's what the rich and famous do. Give things away. (Oh, but you just know she's gotta be gunning for bigger PR, and I, for one, don't blame her!)
She's started a monthly contest -- the Colleenie Weenie Contest -- and will hold a random draw at the end of each month. This month's top prize is Pirates of the Caribbean on DVD (what, you expected it on beta cassette?), and the booby prize is Cheech & Chong's "Still Smokin."
I want the booby prize! It's been a long time since I saw any C&C and while I never tire of Johnny Depp, I'd prefer to see the old stoners of my youth again.
How can you enter this contest, you ask? Here's another link to her site with full instructions. By commenting on her blog, saying why you want to win, you get one entry into the hat. By blogging about it, as I'm doing here and on Lattegirl Does Civilization, I get six entries. When I put this up on MySpace, I'll get two more entries. That's 9 entries for this month alone, if my math is correct, and I can never be sure my math is correct, but whatever.
So go on, enter the Colleenie Weenie Contest for fun and maybe a prize!
Saturday night.
This is a test of the emergency weekend blogger system. What are you guys doing tonight?
Me, I just did a thorough tour of the motel's gardens to see which kinds of plants they have growing. Potentilla, rosebush, peonies, hostas, for the most part. Gives me an idea of what I can do with my piece of land.
For the past few weeks, I've had trouble with embedded links. As soon as I add the link, the target words and every word that follows disappear.
I have just tried repeatedly to keep the link "stable" via various methods, but I keep losing everything in my post beyond the link!
This is PayU2Blog stuff and I have several assignments to finish, but I can't seem to get beyond this glitch to complete this assignments!
If any blogger users show up, please tell me if you have any solutions. Blogger Help is, of course, no Help At All.
Thanks.... and ARGH!
To all the kids who survived the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s:
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank Kool-aid made w ith sugar, but we weren't overweight because,
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no cell phones, no personal computer! no Internet or chat rooms.......
WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!
The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!
If YOU are one of them, CONGRATULATIONS!
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good.
While you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave (and lucky) their parents were.
Found over at Vic Grace's place, http://caribooponderer.blogspot.com/
It's high noon, and I'm finished work for the week! WoOt!
Yesterday, Montreal blogger Michel left a comment (or two) and I popped over to his place. That's where the trail 'o links began.
There were pics of his cat Squirrel, then there was Blork's photostream (another Montrealer) and his cat Mini, then the hilarious lolcat , which is a must for all cat lovers. I promise you will giggle at the pictures.
A great way to goof off.
Here's this week's instalment of completely gratuitous links to people I've read for a long time or new ones I am in love with, and the reasons why.
First! Old buddy Louise in PEI has a great bouncy tune up. Check it out! Guaranteed to make a blue-sky day even more joyous, I'm serious! http://www.jeezlouise.net/archives/2007/03/31/are-you-looking-for-the-best-video-and-song-for-today/ .
I've often relied on Louise for some of the best shared tunes around. Her taste in music rocks. I can't get enough of this song! It's so cute! Go see and deplete her bandwidth totally!
Second! Grrls! More Canadian grrls!
Two ladies have struck me recently for their slightly snarky and intelligent writing style:
That Grrl in Toronto; I hardly know her yet. But her website is funky/adorable -- a real dichotomy, semi-cute and semi-hardcore. Doodles of herself are very expressive, witty, yet a bit dark. She's got more than one blog with more than a ton of topics. Very smart. Also: an inquisitive photographer who looks for details the rest of us could easily miss. And we agree that we love books, even if they are slightly shoddy paperbacks of dubious quality.
Weirdgrrl (here, or Limes with Orange in my sidebar) is a gentle cutiepie who has been helpful when I didn't even ask for help. She lives in Calgary. I wonder if she knows Chunks. If not, I have to introduce them. (Note to self, check this out.) Her self-description: "1 part shy intellectual, 1 part edgy chick, 1 part sophisticated woman, 1 part mental patient."
What's not to love?!
When I find a new blog, I do it one of several ways:
by aimlessly hitting “Next Blog” on blogspot;
by aimlessly clicking on an amusing name in someone’s blogroll;
by getting sidetracked during Google searches;
and, more recently, by perusing the boards at PayPerPost, catching that certain “tone” in peoples’ comments, and then going to see their blogs.
There is another aspect of PPP, however, that I have just started (like, today), and that is more serious link love.
Ya’ll old readers know that up until lately, I was doing link love for fun, not for profit, but now I’ve begun doing it for the same-old same-old reasons as everyone else.
I can’t say with any certainty that I will regularly read every blog I link to in these cases; nor would I expect them to come back here out of interest once they’ve done the LL thang.
But one new read in the PPP category is a definite keeper, and it’s called Where’s Mommy’s Prozac?
There is something in her writing (good) and her tone (true, open, witty) that appealed to me right away. She sounds like a lovely, complex human being. I went through a good dozen posts to get an idea of this married mom, till I came to the one she wrote in memory of her brother who died tragically 17 years ago, and I had tears in my eyes.
Nice writing, dear lady.
Kat, who needs no introduction, tells me today that the Google bots are out and about, checking blogs for hits and traffic and lord knows what else they check for to determine ranking.
But her more exact words were, the spiders are crawling.
Which is really creepy, if you think about it for more than 10 seconds. There are virtual arachnids out there, crawling through your blog and my blog and blogspot blogs and maybe your hard drive.
Brrr.
She says it's a slow process, but it's one I am definitely waiting for with bated breath.
WILL I INCH UP TO THREE?
PLEASE OH PRETTY PLEASE?
DO YOU THINK THE SPIDERS WILL LOVE ME MORE IF I USE PRETTY COLOURS AND BIGGER FONT SIZE?
It's going to be one of those days, I think. A day of posting bits and pieces as they arise.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...it's all FUBAR now.
I've been reading Maru for about five years, maybe six.On the administration
A new way forrerd
AWOL war president's "bold" surge strategery: 19 US troops killed, in one of the worst days since the war began. Oh, and we see what you did there, Fuckface Q. Lieberman. Heckuva job, asstool. Feeling proud of yourself yet?
On Blogger
Dear Blogger,
It's not my HTML, it's your HTML. I know HTML, but I'm not going to comb through the garbage code this program generates looking for a tag that Blogger didn't close. Fucking forget that. Also: the "stop showing errors" command doesn't work, so every time I resubmit a post, I get the annoying-ass "tag is not closed" message again.Grrr.
In addition to this insult, you were running like crap all day long yesterday. You blow goats. For a living.
On politics:
Dems to Awol McStupid: don't go there, fuckface.Actual headline: 'Democrats warn Bush not to attack Iran'.
Boy, it's pretty fucking sad that with everything that's happened and is still happening, that little psycho pissant is actually thinking about it.
Over 3000 troops killed, countless maimed, hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, and he's worried about his legacy???? Fuck, dude, here's a hint - And do not get me started on the pathetic panderers of the press corpse. Shit, Stephen Colbert had it exactly right when he laid into you last year, didn't he? And nothing's changed. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Conservative cracklapper Hugh Hewitt defends the vice preznit: "I think, frankly, you're out of line with that question, Wolf. After all, it's not like she got a blowjob. -- "Dick ''go fuck yourself'' Cheney.
are hers. But she peppers her hot and spicy political polemic with these sweet, peaceful photos, which, overall, give me a glimpse at the whole person that is Maru.
A few weeks ago, someone wrote about a new idea in the sphere: a great wall o' blogs at fuelmyblog.
The idea is simple. There are 40x40 pixel-sized squares up for grabs. Take a square, pick an image that best represents you or your blog, upload it, and you're on the wall!
Squares are still free... for now. Who knows if or when that will change? Anyway, you get to keep the square for five years at no charge. It's a way to advertise your blog and get people reading you.
Check out the top left of the front page wall for the little chickadee and you've found me. Look a little further for a picture of our beloved leader, Stephen Colbert, and that's also me.
THIS JUST IN!
Maybe it was luck* that led me to http://parisbreakfasts.blogspot.com/ this blog yesterday. IT IS FILLED WITH CHOCOLATE. The first photo is a large pile of slabs of chunks of crunchy-pieces-laden chocolate, enough to last me a year. Or a few months. And if you scroll down a bit, you'll see HAUTE COUTURE MADE OF CHOCOLATE. Some really incredible gowns -- one of which I'd wear in a heartbeat. Plus, the blog owner is an artist. Look at her watercolours. Verimente bellissima.
*but it was the universe. The universe wants me to eat chocolate.
Come, my little chickadees
Because nobody seems to have discovered the upstairs bird feeder since I put it up on Saturday - even though those plump, noisy, beautiful blue jays are scarfing up the chipmunk food down on the ground - I went out and spread some sunflower seeds along the railing and outer edge of the deck.
And who came by, 10 minutes later? The cutest of all winter birds, a chickadee. 
I wish we had grosbeaks here, too. They're even more adorable.
I expect the cats will be jostling for space behind the laptop (hmmm... I calculate room for two; three, if they knock down the plants) and all of us will be in for a spectacle in the coming months.
DAILY WRAPUP
For those (DJ), who've been following the saga of Christina, the moochers finally moved out (two weekends ago, I think it was) and the slut girlfriend has FORBIDDEN Christina's son from going to the house to visit (or have his midday lunch during the workweek, as he once did). Christina's happy to have her space back, though.
And, finally, we've found a steady ride to school for the Teen. A student who lives 3 minutes away from here and also attends classes picks him up and brings him home. I pay for gas. Unfortunately, this perfect arrangement ends just before Christmas, when the student (who is clean-cut, handsome, neatly dressed and polite) finishes his course. ::SOB!::
Until then, things are stable, so I can worry about that later.
And this concludes the blogging day.
Crazy Kate answers the door on Halloween night wearing only a towel, causing consternation in Mormon-heavy Utah.
Mark gets his avatar off the tennis court and into a computer lab. Fitting, since he’s the dude who just spent about CAN $1 million dollars on a shiny red laptop.
Dooce has her all-Chuck calendar up for sale. Somehow, the dog manages to maintain his dignity.
Markiss is trying to make us all go blind with his freaking tiny red font. Which is a shame, because if I go blind, I shall never gaze upon his devilishly handsome visage again.
Kelly is trying to quit smoking, and her husband should fear for his life.
Chez Bumptious, the lady of the house has been gone for precisely a month. Her readers, including me, have been posting comments in mounting alarm, although not without a good measure of humour. In the process, I have developed a liking for someone called Chilly, although sadly, she (I think) never includes anything more than her nickname, so I don't know if (she) has a website. (She's) fun.
In Bumps's absence, we've boosted the comments on her very last entry to 51 so far.
Another commenter, who apparently considers Artie Lange as being a comedic genius (as opposed to, say, a fat, slovenly, unattractive, average actor) and that I am a "snooty byotch" (for which I thanked him), might have stopped over here out of curiosity. He made some reference to me watching black and white TV, the point of which escaped me (unless he thinks I am... OLD?! OH, THE HUMANITY!) (UPDATE: Crazy Kate pointed out that he also called me a luddite, and I agree with her: good word.)
He's a guy of few words, but I suppose the vocabulary he does have at his command is sufficient for his purposes, which appear to include flaming complete strangers on other peoples' blogs. Frankly, I'm surprised he knows how to use a computer.
Nothing much else to report! I accomplished what I had on my schedule today and then some. Did not hear a word from Miranda, although she paid me for work done to date. Maybe I should make nice and get some more money out of her... I don't know. Should I try to wait her out/call her bluff or contact her?
