While I was out of town, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents killed some more people. Because that's what they do now. Kill people.
Via my Member of Congress: "Fear does not secure our border. Violence does not secure our border. Terrorizing our communities does not secure our border."
We need to keep pushing. Keep witnessing. Keep protesting.
Someday we'll (as a nation) regain our sanity, and those responsible must be held accountable. Right now all we can do is keep the records. The records will be needed later.
(I have to believe that the records will be needed later.)
I'm a little further along on the second side of the sweater:
For comparison, last week:
And the week before that:
And before this I had ripped the whole thing out and started over. So, I've made decent progress.
Now I have some decisions to make. It's almost back to the size of the first side:
And, as I mentioned last week, sister-in-law doesn't remember exactly what she asked me for, so I have a little lot of leeway in how I put this thing together.
The first thing I need to do is to get the second side as big as the first. Then, it's a question of how much bigger, or do I start to square it all off?
What would be really helpful would be a working day where the kiddos have plenty of work to do, and I have paper and a pencil to sketch ideas. Alas, it's still summer. So, I might get these ovals to about the size I want and then get stuck for a bit.
This Christmas present is already seven months late, so what's another month or two? (Her birthday's the end of September, so no one mention how it could become a future gift. Those deadlines would just unnerve me.)
Think you know pink? I got 16 out of 18. Not bad. There were a couple I just did not know. (And there were a couple that were really good guesses.) Good luck. Let me know how you did in the comments.
I've joined the short video social media ecosystem. I'm not proud of this. But sometimes it's nice to just look at short videos online to wile away the time. (My platform of choice: Facebook Reels. Yeah, I know.)
Today I'm sharing 13 creators (for Thursday 13) who I enjoy. I have included one video from each as well as a link to their YouTube channel. Let me know in the comments of anyone I should find or if you watch these creators as well.
He takes videos of animals and adds voices, as if the animals are talking. It's something we've seen before, but it's still funny. This is two rams, one who is angry and wanting to fight.
When these pop up on my feed they suck me in. He reads posts from Reddit (usually AITA, but this one is a petty revenge), and two others sit on the couch and react. They discuss. It's way more fascinating than it should be. (And there's way more to it than what I usually see, if you follow the link.)
These two kids (well, twenty-somethings) listen to music that they have not heard before (but you most definitely have) and react. In this video, they're hearing Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain". They seem to enjoy most of what they listen to, and it's just fun watching them hear it for the first time.
She has some interesting takes on things. This video is where she's reading the comments section of a question someone posted online. Some of these are pretty funny.
This creator has a few different things she does. She finds ridiculous clothing pieces made by famous design houses that are crazy expensive, but you wouldn't want it anyway. And here's a bad design short. Oh, this is very much NSFW. You've been warned.
He works in a phone store (which he does not name). And he tells stories of bad customer interactions. It reminds me of my days working retail. Yes, customers are this bad.
She does shorts on math. There's a lot of different ways to calculate things that I find interesting. This short is on where the word square came from (for you math-phobics).
He talks a lot about his family, mainly his daughter who must be a teenager. In this short he lists various punishments he can come up with in case she misbehaves. Like chaperoning prom and showing off his dance moves. Of which he has no good ones.
"Here's something I wish I knew before I was in my thirties," is how he starts all his life hack videos. Well, I'm in my fifties, and I didn't know some of these. I definitely didn't know this about three fingers on my laptop trackpad.
While in Ohio visiting family, I got a chance to see some of the sights. (Assuming all went well with my flight, I'm at home today.) This is not a travel blog, but I'm going to post about my trip anyway.
I was not the only visitor. My sister-in-law's friend and her 16-year-old daughter were also in town.
On the 4th of July, Priscilla (blog alias) asked the various local friends about what things she should see while she was in town. The Ohio natives gave her a list, and on that list they all concurred that Loveland Castle was something she should see.
Harry taught the boys the lessons of the knights. The boys said they couldn't be knights without a castle. Harry decided to build them a castle.
Okay, so Priscilla (and the rest of us) drew some Conclusions about Harry based on the stories of his life. (I will not repeat said conclusions, but we highly doubt the assertions that he turned down fifty marriage proposals.) And we gave the castle some inappropriate nicknames. But Priscilla decided she had to see it.
Somehow I got invited along on this excursion. My niece Liv decided to join us. Priscilla's daughter was at her skate camp (the reason they were in town), and my sister-in-law ended up with doctors' appointments, so neither were able to join us.
The castle is outside of Cincinnati. My brother lives outside of Columbus. Those two cities are about 100 miles apart, so the journey took us under two hours.
We found a guy sitting at a table, and we paid our fee to get in. He directed us to a small room with a video on loop that showed the guy, at that point in his 90s, continuing to build the castle.
(Not the video, but this shows some of what was in that video. Someone recorded the video, and you can find that here.)
Then we made our exploration. We headed upstairs, a very narrow, very steep staircase. (There was a handrail, which I totally needed.) The whole castle is stunning, but it was a hot, humid day. We were a bit punchy. And our Conclusions were at the forefront.
In the entry, there was a woman running the giftshop and answering questions. Her father had been a Knight of the Golden Trail (KOGT), and she had been visiting the castle since she was a small child. Priscilla expected that she should also be a knight. Apparently, the knights would not allow female members (except for one exception, now deceased).
Priscilla had lots of questions. It sounded like the current knights use the place as a sort of clubhouse. Our guide kept trying to go back to the script (she repeated things we had read online before arriving) and told us about the "security" door (with three different ways to open it and a sword at the ready). I got a picture of a different door upstairs.
The castle is gorgeous. It's amazing how one random guy built this thing mostly from rocks picked up near the river (and from bricks made using milk cartons), even if he was probably a kook and maybe worse?
We wandered around a bit more, taking in the gardens out back.
And finally we were ready to leave. Priscilla had questions for the ticket seller outside. Namely, why the woman inside couldn't be a knight? He hemmed and hawed about how women couldn't be knights, and ultimately, neither saw the other's point. (Priscilla was sure he was cursing her out under his breath.)
The umbrella covers the ticket seller and his table.
The trip was definitely worth the price of admission ($5). It is an amazing structure. But Harry was definitely an odd duck.
(We met up with my sister-in-law for dinner. We laughed so much about the whole trip. It was a crazy day.)
One more video, this one is a great description of the place:
Today I'm getting on an airplane (or I'm on one or I'm arriving home--and not getting stuck overnight in Denver like I did last year), so you might not see me today. (I'll be around tomorrow, or Thursday if... Well, I'm planning on being around Wednesday.)
So, like last Tuesday, here's another Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. This one is about Bari Weiss being put in charge of CBS News. This happened months ago, but this episode is from when it was new. How well has this aged? Hmmm....
I'm still in Ohio, visiting family. (I leave tomorrow.)
We've done a few road trips. We've spent some time just hanging out. And I've done a little crochet...
I'm not quite where I was when I ripped it all out, but I'm getting closer. And it's not nearly as ripply. (For comparison, before...)
So, progress.
(I should probably mention that sister-in-law doesn't entirely recall the conversation we had a year ago when she described what she wanted me to make her, so I've kind of been released from making this whole thing an oval. Before I leave, we're going to measure this against her, and then I might just square things off to make the whole thing simpler. Or not. We'll see how I proceed from here.)
When Quizly started showing me the color quizzes, I wondered if they were going to hit all of the colors. It took a while (as they'd show me one and then it'd be a couple weeks before I saw the next one), but it got to the point where yeah, they have a quiz for each color. (I haven't seen all of them as of this writing, but I've seen enough to know that they all exist.)
I got 17 out of 18. Again, some of these I knew via process of elimination, and some of these were lucky guesses. (There were a couple I did actually know.)
(Now that I know it's an annual event, I'll be more careful to collect some more. I came up a little short, so the last couple are posters I found in classrooms that I snapped pictures of. Kinda meme-y. I hope you don't mind.)
1. I think I saw this on Bluesky, and now I can't find the creator to credit. I showed this to the art students in August as I thought it was something they should see.
2. Same creator as #1. Very good education-type explanation.
3. Also found on Bluesky. You can find the whole comic here.
4. Vintage cartoon.
5.
6.
7. I looked at this. And I looked at this. And then I remembered that that white thing is called a buoy. And then I couldn't stop laughing for five minutes.
8. I love to watch the tracking of everything I order online. I feel this meme so hard.
Sometimes I like to insert a GIF into my blog posts.
And it's super simple to do. If you've been putting images in your blog posts, you already know how to do this.
(This is what you get when I have no good ideas on what to write about. If you have any blogging questions, feel free to ask in the comments. If I know how to do it, I'll write a blog post about it.)
Step one: find a GIF you like. I usually go to Giphy, but there are oodles of sites you can use. You can even make your own (which I don't know how to do, but I'm sure there are instructions somewhere on the internet).
Step two: get the URL of the GIF. On Giphy you can just click on the one you want to use and click on "Copy Link". (You can also "Download", but that's a way more labor intensive way to do this.)
Step three: paste that URL into "Insert Image".
The "Insert Image" is the little picture icon. Click on the arrow to get the drop down menu.
And choose "By URL". You'll get a dialog box where you can paste the URL you copied from the GIF site.
And then you click on "Insert Image". (If there's an error, the GIF won't show up on the screen. Check that you have the URL copied correctly. If everything is correct, then Blogger is being difficult and you'll need to pick a different GIF.)
Once the image is inserted, you can fix the size:
That box should pop up with the image, but if it doesn't, click on the image and it should. The circled icon is for sizing. It'll say "Original", but you can make it small, medium, or large.
Just be careful that it isn't bigger than the size allotted for your blog post. (You can check that by hitting "Preview" in the upper right hand corner. If it's too big, you can go back and use a smaller size.)
And that is all there is to it. Generally it takes me longer to find the GIF I want to use than it takes to insert it in the post.
Do you use GIFs in your posts? Do you have a good idea for a topic I can do on blogging this summer?
I am currently out of town visiting my brother and his family. I wrote all my blog posts for the time I'd be away ahead of time. That's been easy for everything except my "current events" day, or the day I scream into the void about how angry I am about the latest outrage.
So, for today I'm just posting an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. This episode is from May, and it's about AI Chatbots.
Scary stuff, isn't it? (I'm still around visiting blogs. I'm not out in the wilderness or anything.)
Last week I made the decision (while writing last Monday's post) to rip out that second side and start over. I got it fully frogged and restarted when it was finally time to leave. And while I did some work on it on the plane, I'm not quite to where it was before I ripped it out.
(Sorry about the background. I did not pack my off-white fabric that I use for photos.)
Ta-da! Flat.
Of course, I ended up ripping it back a bit on the first leg of my flight. And when I arrived. But I've still made some solid progress.
Now I'm eyeing the first side...
I may rip it back a couple rounds. I'm not sure. I'll see how it goes.
My sister-in-law is impressed with it thus far. I'm not sure how I'm going to make it sweater-shaped, but that's not at issue at the moment. Getting this oval to lie flat is. But at least I got some good feedback.
My crochet companions so far have been Shadow...
...who became fascinated with the yarn and leapt on it (and on me). I yelped and jumped. His claws were out, but he didn't scratch me.
And then there was Delilah...
...who basically just wants attention.
I haven't gotten pictures of Winter or Calliope (the other cats) or Artemis (the other dog) yet. It's been a timing thing.
So, sort of progress, but since I'm out of town and not on my usual schedule, I don't know how much I'm actually going to accomplish. But hey, I didn't leave it at home, so it will be more than if I had left the yarn behind.
This summer's quizzes have a theme: the colors. Quizly did a series of quizzes with one question. Of the choices, only one is the color of the quiz. Today we're looking at blue.
I lucked out with this one and got 20 out of 20. Is blue easier than the other colors? Or were the other choices just more obvious? I knew quite a few of them, but a couple of them were lucky guesses.
How did you do? Are you an expert on blue? Let me know in the comments.
I am getting on a plane today (or I'm on a plane or I'm getting off a plane, depending on when you read this). I am going to visit my brother and his family in Ohio for several days. (They have internet and I am taking my computer with me. I'll be around the blogosphere, although I may not be checking in daily.) So, in honor of my travel day, I thought it would be fun to find the top 13 U.S. airports. Yes, this is a Thursday 13.
You've noticed it, right? In Blogger blogs, the first line of the first paragraph starts a space over.
It's a minor thing, but it bugs me. Why does it do that? How can I fix it?
I don't have an answer to the first question. Not the "why?" anyway. But I do know how it's happening.
If you open a new blank blog post, you're greeted by a blank template. Before you do anything, switch from "Compose view" to "HTML view".
click on the image to make it bigger
And you'll notice there's already some code on your page:
click on the image to make it bigger
It's basically gibberish. It's just some placeholders in between code that means "paragraph". If you look in your toolbar, it'll show "Paragraph" rather than "Normal". "Paragraph" means when you hit the "Enter" key on your keyboard, a gap of a whole line is left after your previous paragraph.
(If you want to use "Normal", that line isn't left, and you have to hit "Enter" again to get that space.)
If you try to delete that code, in Compose view it'll go back to "Normal". If you hit the back button to delete that space in Compose view, things go wonky.
So, most bloggers just leave the space in. But you don't have to.
The way to get rid of the space is to begin the post. If you start with writing, start writing. When you hit "Enter" to get a new paragraph, begin writing the new paragraph.
Only after you have started a second paragraph can you go back to your first word and hit "Backspace" to eliminate that space.
Yes, I know. It's an annoying extra step. But it's the only thing I've found that works.
But what if you start with an image?
If you upload an image using the picture icon in the toolbar, an extra line of space is added to the top of your blog post.
I have not had luck in hitting backspace before the image to make the extra line go away. (If you have, please leave how you get it to work in the comments.) But I can make that extra space disappear by deleting the first paragraph code (in "HTML view") after I've uploaded the image.
If you delete everything highlighted in gray, that space goes away. Be very careful to get both "p"s and the carrots on either side.
When you go back to "Compose view", your post will be back in "Normal". But if you click on the arrow, you can switch it back to "Paragraph", and it'll stick.
Of course, if you haven't noticed this issue and it doesn't bother you, feel free to ignore this post. But things like that irritate me, so I take the time to make sure I don't have that space.
What about you? Do you eliminate the space? Have you never noticed? Or are you on a different blogging platform and don't have the problem? (Or do you know a better way to fix this?)
