12-11-02 @ 7:01 am EST

Whatever happened to the days of five to six views? I remember fondly when I would sometimes get that many hits to the journal, and more (hits, I mean, not journals), within an hour. No longer...*sigh* I knew it wouldn't last. I really MUST have driven almost everybody off.

I added a moon and a dog Webding to my Diaryland journal so you can't see them here. That's what they are, a moon and a dog. But I like to think they're a moon and a wolf, or a moon and a jackal! They're very cute. Graphic fonts, I love them. Almost like images. But with free hosting.

Dad went for a walk yesterday morning. ! WALK? DAD? That's what I said. He said he usually walks around at work, but since he's on vacation, he would take a walk down the road instead. ! I'm somehow surprised I never knew this. He walked down to the tracks and back. Hum. Later on while napping during Third Watch I dreamed I was talking to Dad and he spoke back with a Latino accent. I got very confused and asked him, "Why are you talking like that?" As if he didn't hear me, he kept it up. "Stop that!" I snapped. No luck. He was going to go visit somebody or something...but that and the accent, combined with the walk, made me very nervous. I woke up then and found Yokas and Bosco releasing some Latino guy into enemy gang territory. I guess that explained that then.

Then I probably dreamed about boobs, because rather than air Cold Case Files, A&E got the brilliant idea to air a show all about breasts. They've done hair, now mammaries. When do the guys get THEIR turn? Next up on A&E: Phalluses!

I had some dream yesterday that I was truly beating up my desklamp. I hate that thing. If the switch isn't turned just enough (which is hard to do right), the bulb fuses to the lamp and is next to impossible to get out. Damned lamp and fusing bulb. I beat it with scissors when I get TRULY angry.

When I told Dad about this ("You're using too powerful a bulb"--well, HE gave it to me!), it reminded me of the Fan Incident. I love the Fan Incident, it makes for a great show of how stupid I can truly be. This was when random fan noises would drive me mad when I tried to sleep. I would regularly beat my fan to try to get it to quiet down. EVERY little whine and creak and bump would drive me nuts. I finally got my SoundSpa or whatever for Christmas to alleviate the noise (I turn it to White Noise all night and leave it there, though my room could sound like crickets or rain or a mountain stream or the ocean or even a heartbeat if I wanted it to), so I've grown used to the stupid fan. But this one time was truly bad. I was rewinding a tape in my tape player and the fan was going and I left the room for a moment. I came back to hear this HIDEOUS whining filling the room. Immediately I suspected the fan, and tapped it. No luck. So I bumped it. No go. I hit it, smacked it, grabbed it by its scrawny neck and yelled. It wouldn't shut up. Finally I resorted to alternately strangling the poor thing and bashing it mercilessly against the file cabinet, but it WOULD NOT STOP WHINING! Furious and most likely crying by now, I just unplugged the stupid thing.

And...the WHINING CONTINUED.

You saw the punchline coming, right? Yep...it was the tape player all along. The tape had finished rewinding, but it hasn't an autostop, so it was sitting there going EEeeEEeeEEeeEEee while I stood and beat the crap out of the poor innocent fan. Gah. I stopped the tape, and the whining ceased. And then I commenced feeling very stupid.

Just thought I'd share that story with you, to fill up this entry. Remind me to share the Helicopter Incident someday while I'm at it.

I found a gorgeous diary template and am checking out the designer's other ones, but ugh, they're very odd and ugly. Disappointing. Hate it when that happens.

I really need to start Part 101. *sigh*

Well, Skew got added to Diarist.net, but I'm also a bit disappointed with that. For starters, they didn't put it at the front of the list like they did the other "new" diaries (added like in November). Instead it's in alphabetical order, back in the S's. Why's that? Secondly, it doesn't look like you get many hits there; and thirdly, when I went to the Michigan section in the hopes of finding other intriguing local diaries (not saying that MINE is intriguing...probably far from it), I found that many of the links have since gone bad. Why don't they delete/purge bad links? The diarist should have the responsibility of providing a working link; the moment it goes bad, like webrings, you should be kicked out. A few led to pages that had next-to-no or no entries at all. Why did they bother adding those? If they got rid of all the nonworking diaries there, there would be only a handful, and most of those are bored teenagers taking online quizzes (quizes?) and stuff...*sigh*

I did find one person asking about the weather in CHEBOYGAN. Why Cheboygan of all placse? Left them a note telling them how the weather was. Har.

Got a return e-mail from FFN regarding my complaint about their file loading page...I didn't talk about that in here, did I...well, I ranted about it in the Ranters' forum or whatever it is. Basically, I can't update Manitou Island there anymore because there are so many fields to fill in on one page that it pulls errors and I can't fill in the proper fields; they don't even load. So I wrote to them and suggested they split the loading page up into several pages for longer stories. I can't believe I got a reply, but I'm too afraid to read it, as always. I guess I'll go check out the page from time to time to see if they've changed it, but I doubt they will. Why change a site for one dinky person like me, huh? Even if I was only complaining because my readers won't be able to see the rest of the story now. All four or five of them. If that many even.

ONLY SEMIRELATED RANT: I am SICK and tired of the people who have a lot of items on this site being made to feel--often by the higher-ups--that they're space hogs. I wouldn't complain about this if I didn't keep coming across this attitude. It's like there's a drive to make such people who are actually PROLIFIC and CARE about writing feel guilty. Face it: These people are the ones who PAY to use that space! The more space somebody takes up here now, the more they have to pay. The price of a premium upgrade is going UP ten dollars (!!) come the new year. That's $120 a year, for space you can get for free elsewhere. If humanly possible, I plan to pay for the rest of the upgrade (P. paid for some, thank you!) to keep what I've got (when I formerly was going to pay to store a bit MORE!). So why the complaints and guilt trips? It's not like we get the space for free. We PAY for it, thus there should not be any griping about what space hogs we are. Get over it. We're probably the reason the site isn't dead quite yet. Though who knows how much longer...it's gone rapidly downhill since April...

Okay, I think I'm done with that...just so tired of seeing these complaints, when we are the ones who have to shell out to take up that space. Not like we're freeloading or anything. I'm over the limit currently, but I do plan on paying my due...

I KNOW I had something else to comment on. What was it? Let me wander off and think.

Oh yes. June (Ma's boss) got another cat. She already has a humongo ragdoll named Dolly (I call her Muffin). Like a $400 cat or something. (And she can't ever seem to pay Ma on time, go figure. Maybe it's just me.) Anyway she heard that ragdolls are social cats, so bought another female, named Missy. (I would probably call her Mushroom or Marshmallow if I could see her.) So far...they do not like each other. Ho-hum. I hope they grow to like one another though. Dolly is such a big mooshball. I can totally picture her snoogling Cosmas. Not sure how Coz would react though. He'd probably cry. He's such a girlie.

He suckled at Ma's blanket the other day again. Weirdo. And he caught either another or the same flying squirrel as it raced through, then lost it again. AAGGGGHHHH JUST GO CATCH A MOUSE LIKE ANY NORMAL CAT, WEIRDO!

Found a couple of okay templates, but I spent ages making Skew all blue, plus my typing's gone bad (you wouldn't believe how many corrections I've had to make via backspace--whatever happened to my good typing?--that almost came out as "god typing," BTW, and "BTW" almost came out as "GTW"), so I have to go now. Tar...