Geocaching News

Looks like I have two new caches within walking distance of my house....I might have to trek out and check them out if the weather allows for it tomorrow.

We aren't getting hit by Sinlaku any longer but it has swung back around from Taiwan and we are continuing to get some weather from it. It is all good though, because regardless of whether it is cloudy and raining, it is still warm outside. We need the rain and a good rain means I don't have to water much...haha.

So we'll see how close these caches are and I might just get to log a few new ones in the next few days...

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One Year Ago on In My Words....Loving The Space Bag

Sinlaku Update

For two days now, we have been told this storm is not going to hit us...in fact it is not going to get close enough for us to even worry about gusts....although we are getting some much needed rain from it tonight.

It is still a very strong storm, and we are watching it just in case it decides to change up on us...but for now...no worries.

I am a bit bummed...I was kind of hoping we would get a close storm but it is not in the cards as of right now...too bad for me. I love the storms...all that energy in the air.

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Two Years Ago on In My Words...Small Bed Project

Sinlaku

Looks like we have a storm heading our way....should be here this weekend but I am sure we will get some of the weather even before that. I am kind of excited because we haven't had a typhoon all season (our other ones were before the season started and none came very close).

I hope it is not too bad because it can ruin the crops for the sugarcane farmers if it is really strong....we'll keep you posted.

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Two Years Ago on In My Words....Back On Track

Softie

I am sitting in my livingroom working on stuff that has been put off for a few days and watching Of Mice and Men.....bawling my eyes out. The old guy just let the others convince him to let them shoot his dog and it killed me....

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One Year Ago on In My Words....We Are On

Gorgeous Day

Today is absolutely beautiful outside. We have had a week or two of warm muggy days....pending thunderstorms that really don't produce enough rain to water anything, and no wind. It has been hot and humid in all ways that it can be.

Today, it is in the mid-80s so far, and dry as a bone outside. I actually have the window in the office open right now...and it is so nice. I walked down the street to the coffee machine to get a cold one and I couldn't believe how nice it was outside. I might have to open up some other windows in the house once the sun moves off the windows.

Now granted, it is only 10:30am so things could change but I would love it, absolutely love it, if this weather lasted all day....too bad I have a meeting at 6pm or I would be BBQing for sure....

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Two Years Ago on In My Words....Tiles

Kitty Land

J and I have decided to fix the deck and pond section of our backyard so that Chase can go outside without getting out of the yard. We are even planning on putting in an area where she can go the bathroom so we don't have to deal with the litterbox in the house anymore...we'll see how it goes.

As of right now, we have put in a door to cover a gap between the two backyards we have, and we have added a few feet to the fence in one spot by wedging in some lattice...I'll take pictures of this later since right now it is raining and I have other things on my plate today to deal with.

Most of that section of our backyard is 10-12 foot high concrete fence so we only really had to work on these two little areas to make it kitty proof. I plan to update her collar tag today just in case she does get out but I am pretty secure that she is pinned in. We have already let her out there several times but since the litterbox is not set up yet, we haven't completely moved her.....I figure we can just see how it goes...

It is funny to see her out there...she seems to love it and when she is walking around it is like we have our own mini lion in a habitat. That entire section of the backyard is framed in glass on the house side so we can see every inch of it from inside the house and it really does feel like we are at the zoo when she is out there checking things out...

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Three Years Ago on In My Words....Where In The World Have I Been

Little Earthquake

We had two small earthquakes this morning.

I haven't felt an earthquake here since last year around this time. They were at 7:54am and 7:55am, and were of 3.6 and 3.0 magnitudes respectively....they pretty much felt like one earthquake but according to the Japan Meteorological Agency site (the earthquake section), there were two of them and they were very close to our island about 20kms down in the water.

Their site is pretty cool...you can just click back in history to see all kinds of seismic activity. When the page loads, it shows you automatically the most recent activity and then you can just click back to see previous ones.

They also have some interesting tsunami and typhoon pages but right now we have no typhoons out in the water so there isn't much to see there.

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Three Years Ago on In My Words...PETA Asks NCAA to Ban Gamecocks Name

Fresh Ink Redux

One of the local stores has started carrying the Hallmark Fresh Ink cards....I am so thrilled...I usually stock up on them when I am in the States...now I don't have to.

There doesn't seem to be a direct link to them on Hallmark's site anywhere but I love them anyhow...here is a link to my other post about them.

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Seven Years Ago on In My Words...Seawall

I FOUND IT!!!!!

Okay, remember this post from last week?

I was devastated that I lost that list of books and was willing to just get the names of the books back even if I couldn't get the whole page back.....I had given up...no one seemed to even have a copy of it (not like tons of people read my book blog anyhow).

Tonight, while fooling around on the computer, I came across one more caching site called Wayback. I thought I would give it a whirl and amazingly, this place had TWO cached copies of that page. Now understand...that page (because of my issues with Amazon) had not even been on the web for the last year, but somehow this site had a cached page of it from October and from May of 2006 when it was still up.

At first the page did not come up fully but the book list was there so I was thrilled.....then I decided to view the source and all my comments, the stars and all the other stuff about each book is in the source...so I just have a lot of cutting and pasting to do but at least I don't have to do it from scratch.

You have no idea how happy I am that this list was found....for a perfectionist like me, not having one year in the middle of all the other years was just terrible....not knowing the names of the books I had read was equally as terrible...whooohoooo....this just made my day!!!!!

So now, the lesson from this is not to just let Wayback retrieve your stuff for you....the lesson is that backing up important blog posts and anything else you want to keep on your computer is essential (and that sometimes if you don't, you will get a second chance like I did).

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Two Years Ago on In My Words...Myst, Riven and the Like

Astronomy Picture of the Day

If you don't know about this site...you should check it out. It is awesome....one of my new daily favorites. Chicken turned me on to it with the happy people dancing video.

What a great idea.

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Two Years Ago on In My Words...Sounds of Footsteps

I Did It Again

Pledge got on the wood floor in the kitchen....you know what this means...


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Three Years Ago on In My Words...Squirrel Aftermath

Hangers

My mom worked at Sears when I was a kid.....I am still using some of the pant hangers for my wet clothes...those babies rock.

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One Year Ago on In My Words....Our New Wheels

Progress (Or Maybe Not)

I have actually been getting quite a few things done that have been nagging me (no, not the big things that have been on my list since last year, but others) and that feels great. Thing is, most of them aren't on the list, so what do I do? I add them to the list of course so that I can then strike them out....duh!!!

One of the things that I have wanted to do was get all my book posts on my reading blog switched over to Powell's from Amazon because I am not doing business with Amazon anymore. While I was waiting to do this, I had made most of my old posts into drafts so they wouldn't be seen and therefore the links to Amazon would not be available. This included all of my year end recaps.

Okay, so the other day, I spend a fair amount of time updating that blog with my new post for July which had all my books from our trip listed in it. While I am on there, I figure, what the heck, why not just get the update for the year ending 2007 done and then fix those other posts. I do this.

Now, here is the bad part.

After I was all done, I go to view the blog and realize that in the year end recaps, the html I was using to show little stars for rating of books, was not showing little stars in anything but Internet Explorer. Well, if you know from a previous post, I recently switched over to Firefox from IE because it pissed me off one day, and that is how I am...I love using Firefox now but there are small (miniscule actually) cases where I still do need to go on the web in IE. Anyhow, I wanted the posts to show stars in Firefox so I did some searching and found some html that would work to make this happen.

I went back to the recaps (which mind you have only been re-published for one day at this point) to get this done. Basically, I copied the html (Ctrl C) I needed to use, and then selected the old area, deleted it with a backspace and then pasted in the html from my clipboard using my keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl V). This worked fine on two of the recaps and most of a third. Unfortunately, one of the quirky things about Firefox is that sometimes it doesn't get along with Blogger....and what is selected in the post editing window is not what gets deleted....you can see where this is going, right?

Yep, that is right. For my 2005 book list, most of it was deleted during this process of modification, but it was happening above where I could see in the ITTY BITTY POST EDITING WINDOW BLOGGER GIVES US. So I dind't notice it until I had already re-published the post......

As soon as I realized what had happened, I tried to get back to the previous version and couldn't (those fast Blogger servers), and even tried to find a cached copy of it online. Unfortunately, that didn't work either because the recaps were posts that hadn't be online except for that day and therefore hadn't been recently cached by the search engines. I even wrote to our friendly Blogger Employee (being a Blog*Star does sometimes have its perks) and he was not able to help me retrieve even a text copy of it.

So if there is anyone out there that does read my reading blog regularly and might have printed or saved a copy of my 2005 list to read from....I would love a copy of it....otherwise it is just one more thing lost to the ethernet...

Right now, I have the post saved as draft until I can figure something out. I don't own most of the books I read during that time anymore so I don't even know where to start to recompile it. I DIDN'T BACK UP the post like I SHOULD have.....back up, people, back up,...I am living proof of losing something you don't want to lose.

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Two Years Ago on In My Words...Amazing Skies

Another Product Down The Tubes

Well, I was a huge fan of Pond's Clean Sweep cloths until this week. A few weeks back, the packaging changed on their product. On the 30 count package (which is in plastic "babywipe" kind of set up), they added a cereal box type outer package with "new look" printed on it. This box-like package is immediately thrown away the first time you open the package. The only reason for it I can find is to make the product easier to stack on the shelves at the store.

So I email Pond's about it....actually the email ended up at Unilever, the parent company. With a week of traffic going back and forth, I get nothing but a canned response the first time, with no LEGITIMATE reason for adding unnecessary packaging to a perfectly good package, and further responses ask me to call their CS line....like those fools that answer the phones are going to know why some marketing person made an executive decision to increase the useless packaging in the world.

So I sent them a note telling them that since they can't seem to take the time and explain to a loyal customer the reasoning behind the new useless packaging, I was going to stop using their product because it is increasing the waste in the world, not improving it.

I hope this blog article causes you to do the same. I will get off my soap box now....thanks.

Note: In the second picture, the box is just slipped over the same plastic packaging in the first picture. You can't open the product from the outside of the box, it has to be removed and then you are just left with the original plastic packaging....the second picture doesn't do the point I am trying to make justice but it was the only picture I could find of it

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One Year Ago on In My Words...Back On Island

Mishka's Reading

I finally got a chance today (really had other things on my plate but got sucked into this somehow) to update my reading blog with my read's from July (while we were on vacation). I also fixed all the links on all my other posts that were previously pointing to Amazon (because I don't do business with them anymore) and now the links all point to Powells.

Lastly, I did the year-end consolodation for 2007....it is about time...since we are already in August...huh?

Anyhow, if you have time check out the links and perhaps you will find some good reads in there for you as well.

Out of Habit

Since our vacation, I have had a hard time getting time in the day to read blogs...I got used to not reading them much while we were gone and I was paying for every second of Internet time and now it is hard to get back to it....I am lurking on a few and I am still trying to keep things under control via my Google reader, but I am not as active as I was a month ago...that is for sure.

Another thing I am not doing much of is helping out on the Blogger Help boards....and I do need to get back to that...and pronto...haha.

On the other hand, I seem to have found time to take on a few other projects (fodder for another post)...so I guess that is good....or bad...depending on how you look at it.

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One Year Ago on In My Words...Hitting Bumps But Living Through It

Eclipse

Don't forget about the eclipse....especially if you are in a spot to see it. We might get to see it right around sunset here....but they are also going to broadcast it on NASA TV if you want to check it out from a location that won't get a good view....

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Three Years Ago on In My Words....Next Blog Please

Contacts

If you don't drop the contact into the actual contact case before adding the solution, you will wake up to a crusty clear thing stuck to your countertop.

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Two Years Ago on In My Words...Beading Again

Second Level of Hell

Okay, first I get talked into joining Myspace by my sister and my neice as a way for us to all stay in touch more and I really don't mind it now that I have it set up the way I want it to be and I don't download anything from it so I have not had any virus or trojan issues with it.

Now, I have started using Facebook as well. Hitch here is that I had to use my real name so I can't open it up to loyal readers here, unless you already know me in real life.....sorry, but I have to secure my anonymonity anyway I can (or at least delude myself that I have some, whichever the case may be), so if you are a family member or friend that is using Facebook and reads my blog, send me a add request and we'll get connected.

So far, I have had some fun customizing it and playing around with some of the applications....

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Two Years Ago on In My Words...No Watering Needed

Chatan Summer Carnival

Last night, J and I were supposed to meet some friends for dinner but didn't end up finding them so we ate some sushi at a "sushi go round" place near the Ferris Wheel. It wasn't the place that I really like to go to but they were super busy so we opted for the second best place in the area.

Anyhow, after eating our fill, we decided to walk a bit. We ended up heading towards Sunset beach because there were tons of people around and it seemed like something had to be going on. We were right.....once again, I had stumbled upon the Chatan Summer Carnival. I did this once before when my sister was visiting several years ago.

So we hung out, watched a bit of the music acts, had a few drinks and then realized that, like most festivals in Japan, there would be fireworks at some point.

Eventually they did start and there was one part where they shot out these red ones onto the water in front of us. Everyone assumed it was a dud that went to low or something but it turned out that it was the set up for a series of fireworks that were launched off the water into these beautiful arcs. I had never seen them done that way before so it was completely cool.

I took a bunch of pictures but these are three of the 6 best ones that came out....enjoy.

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One Year Ago on In My Words...Rogue Valley