You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2006.
It’s a busy week, so I’m just dropping in to give you a few pics. Here are Astrid and Amelia in a rare moment of cuddle — Astrid would rather sleep alone and Amelia would rather play. But they hung out together for about 20 minutes and Astrid even gave Amelia a little bath. And then Zeke had to come and and spoil everything….. (click on pics to enlarge).
…and well before the parrots–Zeke was muzzy and grumpy this morning. See, the spring semester started Wednesday, which threw me off because here it is Friday, the fifth day of the workweek, and only the third day of classes.* Plus, I still have the cold, despite much napping and vitamin C and Airborne. So last night I tossed and turned in bed and woke to check the alarm clock once or twice, because I HAD to get to school by 7:30 this morning in order to prep for my 8:00 class. And I made it, butt in chair at 7:25, prepped for class by 7:45.
It was then, of course, that I realized that my first class this morning isn’t until 9:00.
*It takes very little to throw me off — off topic, off balance, off of my head. Unfortunately, almost nothing throws me off my feed, as my hips, and the jeans trying to cover them, will attest.**
**Although I have been working out regularly, both weights and cardio, since my last post on the subject. I just haven’t gotten around to eating any less. Still, the workout results are noticeable, with all my girly bits getting a bit higher and tighter and less jiggly. At 42, that’s something to be happy about.
I *just* watched Serenity on a Netflix DVD and I expect to wear the damn thing out before I return it, and then buy my own copy and start wearing it out. Good stuff, esp. dialog, and then important people died, dammit. I’m in a Whedon-based angstyhappylustyrahrah roil.
If you are likewise a Serenity/Firefly fan, check out "Serenity in 2000 words or less."
School starts Wednesday. I haven’t done my syllabi yet. I have a thick, yucky head cold. Someone needs to invent a snooze alarm that gives you 10 more days.
Since I wrote the last post, LOM has come up in two more Google searches. The first was Mississippi girl porn, disturbing but not surprising. The second was — I swear to God — toothless women.
I love the Internet.
In other news, please swing by Beak Appetite, maker of Zeke’s favorite parrot food, and vote for Zeke (#22) in their photo contest. That way, he’ll win free birdie food and I’ll be able to spend his food budget on important stuff — yarn and books.
One feature of Typepad, the service that hosts this blog, is my ability to check "visitor stats and referrals." That means that I can see how people arrived at Left of the Mississippi — whether they typed in the addy, linked from another blog that lists my site (Hi Tree, Kazywife, Terby, Brutal, Fumbling!), or had my addy thrown up by a search engine such as Google.
When a search engine is the referral site, I can see just what terms the visitor was searching on. Since terms entered into a search engine without quotation marks will bring up all instances of those words, my site doesn’t even have to remotely address the subject in order to hit. For instance, a recent visitor was looking for Free Building Plans for Duck Pens. Left o’ Mississippi was the first site returned on their search because I have entries mentioning free, duck, and plans. As you can see, unless the seeker fell for my undefinable charm and general wackiness, they were disappointed.
This brings us to today’s discussion. What are unwary Internet searchers looking for when they wash up on LOM? Mississippi is the most common term, and in the past month or so I’ve seen big bugs in Mississippi, Mississippi knitting, and Mississippi Cthulhu. However, as disturbing as the image of southern cultists trying to awaken the dark, tentacled one is,* I must tell you that the most common search that leads to my blog is Mississippi porn. That term leads searchers here because Mississippi, of course, is the name of the blog, and porn because I have a post titled Kitty Yarn Porn (scroll down). I’m thinking that the folks looking for Mississippi porn*** are a mite disappointed with a pic of Amelia slobbering on some expensive S. American wool.
Or maybe not. The second most common search that leads to my blog is kitty porn. Again, LOM comes up on that search because of the Amelia pic. What I’m left wondering is if the searches are launched by deviants who can’t spell, or (and just as damn scary) by deviants who CAN spell and haunt the bushes around pet stores and Humane Societies.
NOTE: Since I started this entry, someone hit LOM by searching for Noah Webster pics. They got here because of my recent Scrabble game blues.
Finally, folks end up at LOM when they do a search on my name: Inez Schaechterle. Now I can imagine that people I know, friends and acquaintances, might do a quick search trying to find this site, although it seems that emailing me and asking for the address would be easier than typing in "Schaechterle." I worry, however, that those named searches are being done by some super secret branch of the Bush administration, trying to track down subversives like me — mostly-vegetarian Democrat liberal academic pop-fiction-reading parrot-owning knitters.*****
Even better was a recent search looking for Inez Schaechterle Nevada. The searcher evidently wanted to find me, with my Nevada roots, rather than some other Inez Schaechterle. However, even with 6 billion + people in the world, I can’t believe another one carries my name.****** If another woman with my moniker does exist, I wonder if, during the 1970s when Germans were still the bad guys in war movies, playground boys taunted her by calling her a Nazi (you know who you are, Larry Shipley)? Or if, round about 6th grade, some of those same boys realized that Inez rhymes, more or less, with anus? Oh unknown and probably nonexistent name-sister, I feel your pain.
*disturbing, but not really surprising, is it?**
**In dark Ry’leh dead Cthulhu lies sleeping, y’all.
***pics of naked, toothless women?****
****I apologize to my very dear friend Sue, who, though from Mississippi, is fully toothed, charming, smart, and, I hope, forgiving. She is naked under her clothes, however.
*****Now that my blog contains the words subversive, Democrat, and porn, Lord only knows who’s going to end up here.
******Although if she exists, I bet she lives in Argentina. German, Latino, post WWII….think about it.
Reports have been surfacing lately that dogs can sniff for cancer and identify it early and darn accurately. Given the choice between having my yearly breast exams with a sterile, up-to-date mammogram lab or a slobbering, doggy-breath Labrador, I’d take the dog.
Okay, I realize this rant is about 3 years too late, but I’ve been in graduate school, studying hard with no $$ for cable TV and a lot of popular culture passed me by. And so I have just come to the conclusion, 2 DVDs into the collected series, that the cancellation of Firefly was simply criminal. Possibly unmoral. And just a big goddamn disappointment all around.
Oh, and that Joss Whedon is a freaking genius. But I knew that by the third season of Buffy.
Humph.
A piece of my knitted work is in the Victoria and Albert museum!
Well, in their online exhibition of non-garment knitting.* To which any
knitter may submit their work. But still — very exciting for a former textile studies person like little ol’ knitting me.
*Look for the pic of Amelia cat killing a pillow.
See, the thing about attending graduate school post 40 is that all that sedentary dissertation writing and the requisite peanut butter M&Ms go straight to your gut. My gut, at any rate, with the ass a close second. And the thing about dissertation weight is that for, say, a year post-dissertation, it can be called "dissertation weight"; after a year, it’s just plain old fat.
My dissertation defense will be a year past come June. So this entry isn’t so much about New Year’s fervor as the unstoppable march of time.
I have collected, therefore, a pair of bicycle shorts and a huge, gut-and-ass-hiding tee shirt, a can of Nair (for those I-don’t-shave-in-the-winter legs), and a key card for the school gym, which is across the freaking street from my apartment. I have no excuses left. Today, I go to grunt and sweat.
May the spirit of Jack Lalanne go with me (Jack Lalanne is dead, isn’t he?).
