Virginia Breeze

How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Maria?
A flibbertijibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!

–The Sound of Music

Remember this song? Some nuns sing it about Julie Andrews. She just doesn’t want to adopt the program. Well I sing it about Evita.

How do you solve a problem like Evita?

Because every time i read one of her posts I end up throwing something out! First it was the rum!

And now it’s my teflon coated frying pan!

http://evolvingwellness.com/posts/160/green-teflon/

I really hope she doesn’t decide that dog hair is bad for us. Sparky would have a fit. Malarky would start reading the help wanted section of the newspaper. And I would have to sleep with one eye open.

But frying pans are not really the issue today. Because I am addicted to sugar. It’s in just about everything we eat and it’s very addicting. You go into withdrawal if you don’t have your fix after awhile.

And I can’t stand the idea of being addicted to anything. So now your blogging buddy is on a diet. And he’s also walking every day. This morning we walked for forty five minutes. That’s up fifty percent from yesterday. And it’s up 150 percent from the day before. Because way back then we were just walking from the living room to the kitchen and back again.

When I noticed that we might one day go in the medical books as a miracle of some sort. Because it looks from up here like we are going to have a baby.

Blogger this year. Reality show icon next year. Right after the cute show about the parents who got six kids at one time after they took fertility drugs.

When I read Evita she mesmerizes me. I’m not sure if I believe everything she says but it doesn’t seem to matter much. Because I was due for an overhaul and she is the only one I see who has a nice looking blog and seems ready to go there with me.

Because when you do stuff like this you need to become really motivated. It’s an extreme deal until new habits are established and pick up some of the load. And even then it’s not a piece of cake as we all know. Hhmmm cake. I have been carrying around a tube of Ritz diet crackers for those moments when death due to starvation seems imminent. And a bottle of diet Seven-Up.

Please don’t tell me they are going to kill me too Evita! I need something!

Sigh. Why am I doing this?

Because you can be a senior citizen who is healthy or at least trying to be or you can go the other way.

Choose. That’s why.

Grumps must move on. . . .have a nice morning.

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The Beatles/ I’m So Tired

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How did I miss this?  I don’t know.  But it’s funny and maybe somebody else missed it too.  So here it is.  David Cook, the American Idol winner, is being interviewed by Kimberly Caldwell and takes the opportunity to ask her out.

That’s the first time I have ever seen that done. There have been some marriage proposals go down on live television.  But this is much more serious!  A request for a date is a major opportunity to be rejected and there is no silver lining.

Do I have to explain that?  So moving on here is the video.   I was trying to catch up on David’s activities and he has been to the Walmart deal and the Tonight Show.  You can see those here if you are interested.  But this is the one that is most fun imho.

Good Evening. My name is David and I am a Themaholic. I can’t turn down a theme. It speaks to me and I surrender.

It doesn’t matter that I have pledged my allegiance to Sadish and his wonderful templates. Nothing matters except getting the next theme fix.

I keep telling myself “This time it will be different”.

Maybe it will. Or maybe I will wake up tomorrow morning full of regret and guilt because I traded Sadish and his great theme in for THIS.

But I don’t think so and besides the night is still young.

There’s lots of time left to install more plugins and see how they work. I don’t want to think about tomorrow.

When it’s still tonight.

Do you change themes very often?  Do you feel that people who change themes often are hampering their blogging efforts?

A month or two ago I was having a problem because SU was starting to bug me. A problem arose and it went down something like this.

I went to Best Buy and asked the Geeky Guy at the repair counter about Vista 64-bit operating systems. He said all the computers with it on them came back through the front door because customers were unhappy. They were unhappy because their printers and other stuff wouldn’t work when they plugged them into their new computers.

Simple enough. If a bit odd. But those of us who have bought enough stuff at Best Buy or other computer stuff stores understand that not all of it works. So I wrote a post about it and it got reviewed by SU afficianados. The next thing that happened was my stat counter started going off like a pinball machine.

And I should have just left it at that. But some dude in Great Britain decided he didn’t like the post and he thumbed it down. This was my first experience with being thumbed down and I didn’t like it. I especially was not fond of the language he employed when he thumbed it. Because you are supposed to use your finger for that.

So I did something you should never never do in most circumstances and especially in a circumstance where SU is involved. I wrote to them and complained about this guy. Because you know what happened next. My new SU friend who has heard it all a million times looked at MY record. And he saw that I had several different user names. Why? Because when I began with SU I logged in fitfully. AND YOU CAN’T LOG IN ON THE FRONT PAGE. The login is located deep inside the tool bar. Take a look!

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

So when I came back after a week or two in the beginning to see if this SU stuff was really any good I couldn’t get in!! The only way to get in is to sign up again!

Perhaps this explains why there is a problem with folks having more than one account on SU. I don’t know. But I do know it explained my situation. In any case the staff SU person was more concerned with my dormant accounts than with anything else. Mr. Bollocks from the United Kingdom was not breaking any rules. And after that my post about Vista that had gathered over 5,000 views in a couple of days suddenly lost its audience.

What happened? I don’t know. But it was actually a good thing. Because it got me over my need for SU juice. I was addicted and didn’t know it. Since that time I have taken another look at my blog and introduced some new elements. I have also started a new blog after purchasing a new theme.  It is called NewsLink Briefs and it will include hard hitting and snug fitting news. (I think that is funny but who knows?)

None of this would have happened if I had continued thinking about SU and their successful enterprise. It also struck me for the first time that they have a wonderful thing going. Because we are supplying them with the product they dispense to the world. We produce it and we refine it. In some strange sense we are all the employees of SU. And that’s great. Volunteerism is a wonderful thing. The problem happens when we are made to feel it is somehow immoral to use SU to help us grow our blogs. Bringing traffic to your blog while using SU is somehow a sin.

And I am happy that all of this is in the rear view mirror now. My stats are not messed up by SU blips any more. And I don’t have to worry about being an immoral SU user.

I still plan to use it to help other bloggers from time to time. But I have other things to do in terms of prime time activity. And maybe this is what SU wants. I don’t know. They were a mystery to me when I first started trying to log on to my new account and couldn’t find the login button.

And they are a mystery now.