I’m preoccupied with getting a new template made, so there’s not much to post. The site will have a completely different look. I hope everyone likes it as much as I do.
As a response to someone who posted about seeing hula dancers in Hawaii, I am posting a picture of Waikiki beach from the top of Diamond Head. I took this in early July when my son and I climbed to the top of Diamond Head.
Tags: Waikiki, Diamond Head
Well, it’s hula-update day. It gets easier and harder each week. It’s easier to do the moves, but something new is added every week, which again makes me wonder if I will ever get it.
This week it was doing the hula movements to the beat on the ipu heke (that’s a double gourd). This is the more traditional hula. Frankly, it would help if the teachers would explain when you are supposed to do certain movements before I attempt it. I think it helps to hear the music or beat first. The Tahitian danicing seems to be going better. My knees are getting stronger, but I still can’t get down very low. I have a lot of work on perfecting the movements before I can go fast as well. I seem to be learning this dance quicker.
I get a lot of encouragement from a couple of the teachers, but one was a bit surly last night. Perhaps she had a bad day…but I do see that she doesn’t have much patience with the beginner class. She’s very knowledgeable about hula, but I wish she could explain it better.
Whoever got to my website by googling “plumeria poisonous dog eat,” I hope you found your answer. But just in case you didn’t, plumeria isn’t poisonous. It’s an edible flower. The stem of the plant is poisonous. It has some milky fluid that is the problem. Be sure your pets only ate flowers. Check this list. My cats ate a bloom, so I did the same search last week. I nearly called the ASPCA poison control, but the message said it would cost me $55 to talk to someone. I promptly hung up.
Technorati: plumeria,
dog, edible flowers
I had no inspiration last night. Could it possibly be from several losses on BE’s Battle of the Blogs? Quite possibly. I think maybe it’s rigged. I lost against blogs that were just plain information blogs and ones that regurgitate the news. What is that about?
The afternoon spent at the hair salon didn’t even provide me with blog material. I think my salon is the only one open on Monday. There’s almost no one there, which is rather nice if you want to get your hair done and get out of there. I actually hate sitting there for the time it takes to get some highlights. I know women who just love the salon. I’d rather be anywhere else.
Today I’m posting a bit of eye candy. It seems that people like pictures. This photo is one of my plumeria plant–it’s not quite a tree yet.
I have caught it.
Is it viral? Might be. It seems to be contagious. I have read other blogs mentioning this bug.
Is it bacterial? I don’t think so. Fungal? Eeuw! I hope not.
Maybe it’s mental. Ah, even better. Perhaps it is some sort of obsessive thing. What do you suppose the psychologists and psychiatrists have to say?
So what is this contagious “disease”? I find myself judging every activity or incident in my life to determine if the situation is blog-worthy. I used to be present. I even came up with a few names for it. In honor of George Orwell, I could call it blog-think. There’s also blog-vision. It works for me. Now the blogger/writer has taken over.
Like on Saturday night…I had reluctantly agreed to meet a friend’s friends.
Let me defend myself here. I’m not antisocial, but because I can’t eat just anything. I avoid most social occasions that involve food. And, why do they all have to involve food? I have what is known as celiac disease (this one’s real), a.k.a. gluten intolerance. I’m not going to go into details here because I might gross out my few readers. It had it’s good and bad points. The good part was it was easy to stay thin, but the pain was awful.
Now, back to Saturday night… It was a good size group of people and their children. I can’t say that I saw anything blog-worthy, but I certainly looked.
Then there are my conversations with my mother that inevitably focus on her mother. Sunday night’s conversation was about how grandmother’s phone service was out and how she couldn’t understand that her Lifeline service wouldn’t work without the phone. She talks on an endless loop of nonsense that repeats about every two minutes. My mother complains quite a bit about taking care of her, and I don’t blame her. Most of the time I’m on the phone I’m praying, “Please don’t let my mother end up like that,” or the other variation, “Please don’t let me end up like that.” It makes me think that dying young might just be a good thing.
After dismissing both situations, I reminisced back to my graduate school days as a teaching assistant. Now, there were some blog-worthy stories. I wish blogs had existed then. I could have written about the stupid things my freshmen chemistry students did. There was one who didn’t know which end of a thermometer to use. I guess she had only seen electronic ones. There were the male students who wanted to date me because they thought I was only a few years older than they. My young looks are both a curse and a blessing–more blessing now than curse. Looking back, I should have taken advantage of the fact that 18-year-olds wanted me (well, not while they were my students). Men my age are either Viagra men (I don’t have the stamina to keep up with an artificial erection.) or men who need Viagra but won’t admit it. I think I should reconsider the much-younger-man thing.
This blog-vision keeps me up late, composing when I should be sleeping. Why do the best ideas occur when I want to sleep? I hate to get up once I’m in bed. If I do, I can’t get back to sleep. If I don’t, after spending hours of composing in my head and vowing to remember by morning, I wake up groggy with no recollection of the brilliance from the night before.
Last night, I got up. I was back asleep by 1 a.m. This morning, my cats wouldn’t let me sleep past 6:30 a.m. I wonder what will happen today that will be blog-worthy.
Technorati: blog, blog-vision, celiac, blogging, writer
What a perfect Saturday! The TCM channel is showing Cary Grant movies all day. I don’t think there has been a more handsome actor than Cary Grant. I have to blame my mother for my love of old movies–and Cary Grant.
While I’d like to post a photo, I don’t actually own the rights. You can check out this site for more.
Technorati: Cary Grant
I thought I’d post a picture of my view everyday from my home office. it was cloudy earlier today. You can still see a few clouds in the sky. Later today, it will probably be cloudless.
I hope you enjoy the view of my little piece of Northern California in August.
It is a beautiful Friday morning. I have had a productive morning. I wish I had more stories about the crazy people I meet as I go about my daily business, but lately I have been running errands at hours when there are few people at the stores.
Technorati: California
So far my day has been pretty uneventful, which is good considering my day yesterday. I have plenty to do, but I just plain don’t feel like it. I began organizing my closet a few days ago, but that has lost its appeal. It’s still a major work in progress. I bought material and elastic to make a pa’u skirt (practice skirt for hula), but I haven’t started that either. I think the fact that I have to sew 7 lines a half inch apart across 5 yards of fabric has me a bit intimidated. I’m not an expert. I’m lucky to sew a straight line for 1 foot, certainly not for 15 feet. I don’t even have a table that will hold the material up so the cats aren’t playing under it, tugging while I’m trying to push it through the machine.
I cleaned the dog food holders/dishes. I have these neat accordion style dog food containers that hold dishes so my Great Dane doesn’t have to bend over too much to eat. They were filthy from being outside. It is nice enough here in California to leave them out. It saves me from hearing crunching in the middle of the night because a cat decided that the dog food is tastier than the cat food. Of course, the dog prefers cat food.
I had to chase the cats down after I found that they had eaten the plumeria flower I brought in. The plant is outside, but it dropped a flower this morning that was still in good shape. I thought I’d bring it in and enjoy the scent. It lasted 2 minutes in a bowl of water. Three of the cats had eaten some. I found two cats fighting over the last petal. Then I spent awhile researching online to determine if plumeria are poisonous. They aren’t. Turns out they are edible. The site I found recommended putting them on salads, drying them for tea or putting them in candy. I tried to find that candy recipe, but I couldn’t. I love the smell of plumeria.
Last night was quite the experience. I spent hours moving my blog to my new domain. Then, Blogger decided to eat my template. I hadn’t saved the new version yet, so I had to start over. Fun. The argument with a friend later that evening isn’t even worth writing about. Perhaps some day I will write about my dietary restrictions that no one understands except those with the same restrictions. Oh well.
I’m ready for a much needed uneventful day. Peaceful. I’m hoping.
Technorati: Great Dane, domain, blogger, pa’u, hula
I finally got around to getting a domain specifically for my blog. What a pain to move everything over and to make sure that all sites directed here know where “here” is. it’s not exactly what I thought I would be doinng this evening, but it took that long for the domain to be available. Six or so hours isn’t too long, but I always forget that it takes that long or longer to get a domain. I’m being hosted by 1and1.com. They have very reasonable prices, but it’s a bit tricky to go live.
I’m still recovering from last night’s hula class. A different teacher worked with me to really get the basics down perfectly. I learned a few more steps. I think I only have a couple new ones left to learn. It’s the Tahitian that is killing my thighs and–most recently–my back. The teacher is trying to get everyone strong, so we did the same move for 10 minutes or so. At the end, we moved up and down. Now “down” is nearly on the floor. My knees just wouldn’t go past about halfway bent. Then I couldn’t get back up without making a horrible face.
This morning I’m a bit sore. If it is anything like last week, I will be more sore later in the day.
