I’m Beautiful Like Me.

Mid-afternoon yesterday, we packed up and headed to Otter Creek again. We weren’t there long, just an hour and a half or so, but it was really nice. The place was packed! Certainly not like going in June on a weekday. The water was still pretty chilly, but it was pleasant to sit on the rocks in the sun. The boy was uncertain about the more swift spots and preferred sitting with daddy on the bigger rock with his feet dangling in the water, as opposed to sitting with me directly in the water.

This little girl and Buddha were super-cute together.

As we were chilling in the creek, I saw B and D waving to me from the bank of the creek. At first I didn’t recognize them or that they were waving at me. They joined us for a few minutes and Husband snapped this rather unflattering photograph of the three of us. B told me that he’s playing football - very exciting. I’ll be sure to see a game or at least a practice. It was great to see them.

Yesterday, T, Buddha and I accompanied P to her niece and nephew’s birthday party. It’s so hard to believe these kids are 20 and 17 years old now - I remember when they were knee-high to a smurf! I love them like they are my own family. Little redheaded Leos, only not so little anymore.

We had pizza and P’s famous Mexican dip. P’s brother-in-law and I talked about our love for Tom Waits and he hooked up me up with the Box Set. T and I won the balloon toss and a water-balloon war ensued. I have battle injuries! I had a great time and so did Buddha. I’m betting T did, too, although she’d never admit it. Between T and I, we took over a hundred pictures! Here’s a less-than-three-minute slideshow of the festivities that took me over an hour to make. Enjoy!

You mean you still aren’t on Plurk? What the hell, go sign up now! I want to hang out with you, so join me.

Plurk has a very simple user-interface. It may seem confusing at first because it is so different from other social networking sites (especially Twitter, to which it is frequently compared). The first two images below are screenshots of my profile. Yours will look similar, although much simpler at first.

At the top of your screen from your profile there is the timeline. In that timeline are plurks (yours and your friends’) - messages you share with others. Inside a plurk, others can respond and have conversations and each plurk receives its own plurk page (see the third image for a screenshot of a plurk page or click the link to see the page for yourself).

I liken Plurk to a combo of instant messaging, a forum and a mini-blog. Some people on my friends list treat plurk the way they likely treat(ed) Twitter and post what appears to be broadcasts. Some people post plurks about what they are doing, where they are going, what they are eating and so on. A few of my friends post interesting articles and intelligent, civil debate follows. I’m really enjoying it (if you couldn’t already tell!). But it would be more fun if more people I know joined in. HINTHINT. It’s a great way to stay in touch and meet new people.

It is still a relatively new social network site (having just launched in May 2008) and new sites are popping up everyday talking about Plurk. There are a few blogs I’ve discovered (and subscribed to) about it and a few of the people on my friends list are developing new plug-ins and add-ons for Plurk. Plurkpix is designed for ease in posting pics in plurks. Plurk desktop is coming. Lots of people have figured out how to use Plurk with their cell phones. It’s quite exciting.

The karma feature is a fun little feature to help you get started and keep you coming back. When you reach certain karma milestones, new features become available to you. The recent big one is the ability to modify your own profile page (from where you do 98% of your plurking) using CSS once you reach 25 karma. As you can see above, I’ve designed mine to look like my blog.

A couple of hints for newbies and would-be joiners: magik linking is enabled in plurk.

-To link to a fellow plurker, simply type the @ symbol before a user or display name with no space. For example, if you wanted to link to my profile in a plurk, type @tata in the plurk.

-To link to an outside website, type the URL of the site followed by the text you want to show in parantheses. For example, if you wanted to link to my blog in a plurk type http://tatasmagik.blogspot.com (tata’s blog). You need a space between the URL and the URL text here.

-To post thumbnails of images, copy and paste the URL of the image ending with .jpg or .gif inside a plurk. However, if the image is hosted a Flickr, copy the URL from the address bar. This is also true of emoticons! No need to wait for higher karma.

-I am adding smilies to a Photobucket account for my fellow plurkers to use.

I hope to see you on Plurk soon!

Husband had a busy day. He had a PT appointment, followed by a doctor’s appointment. Afterwards, he had a pile of paperwork he needed to take by his job. While he was away, I mostly lazed, napped a bit with Buddha. Our stimulus check arrived late in the afternoon. Husband didn’t return home until a bit after 5pm.

He brought home with him thee.most.excellent news! He got day shift! YAY!!! When he told me, I squealed, jumped up and attacked him with a hug. He starts right away. He has different days off now, too - Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I’m thrilled about this. We can have dinner together as a family now. He’ll be home to help with the boy’s tough evenings and to help with the girl’s homework. We’ll sleep together at night! Weee! Great news, indeed.

So, we went to Wal*Mart to cash the stimulus check and immediately went out to buy a tool box for the truck. Trying to squeeze 4-5 people into the cab of his truck is tough enough without needing to deal with all of his tools and work gear. We’ve really needed some sort of solution for our travels and for the time being, this is a good one. T made sure it was big enough for us.

Then we went into the Highlands yet again. We stopped at Twisted, a tattoo/body piercing parlor recommended to me by a student at the Hair Design School that Joy and I went to a few months ago (see post). I am interested in pricing some tribal body jewelry. Unfortunately, they are closed on Sundays and Mondays. Phooey!

Then we headed to KT’s. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s my most favorite restaurant of all time, so I was pretty tickled. It was nice outside, so we sat on the patio. I’ve had better service, but the food was outstanding (as usual). I forgot to snap photos before we ate (in my defense, we were all pretty hungry and it is so good!), but I got a couple of good ones anyway. I had the chicken pesto tortellini, while Husband and T both got the Hot Brown. The pictured portions are about half-size.Waiting patiently for our food…
T was less patient. Damn energy drinks.
Her impression of Mr. Napkin Head.After dinner drink?YES!

We lounged for a good while at the restaurant. Buddha was exceptionally well-behaved. He ate crayons, scribbled, nibbled on fries and bites of our food. After my daiquiri, we left. We took the scenic route home (read: surface streets as opposed to the highway).

I decided to stop by the Hobby Lobby for yarn. It was 8:30pm by then and it closed at 8pm. Curses! So then, Wal*Mart again. Different location, though. I was reluctant, as it is a much smaller store than the one I typically frequent. I expected the selection to be more limited. But I was pleasantly surprised. Not only was their selection pretty dern good, it was better than the selection at the nearby Wal*Mart. I bought a boat-load of yarn and some additional knitting needles. And a big, clear plastic bin for storing my growing collection of yarn. Husband bought a new office chair. We’re tired of arguing over the single one we have! On the way home, we spotted a gas station that had gas cheaper than we’ve seen in a while ($4.08 - how frickin’ sad is that?!), so we stopped in for a fill-up.

Once home, Husband assembled the new chair, Buddha played happily with the new box and I photo-documented my additional stash. Buddha got a bath, then he and I snoozed a while. Husband came to bed and I got up to knit. I completed my first swatch and want to get started on a project of some kind. I browsed Ravelry for some patterns, but everything requires much smaller needles than I have. Impatient as I am, I’m going to improvise a black and red stripey scarf. I knitted (and purled!) 4-5 rows while watching Forensic Files before turning in. When I went in to bed, Husband was still awake. He and I ended up staying up way too late, talking. Much needs to be done today again, particularly for him. I was unable to sleep with all these things swirling around in my head. He set the alarm for 8am and set the coffee pot. Time to condition ourselves for a new schedule.

Now, he’s away at another PT appointment, stopped by the Post Office and the bank. Afterwards, he went by his school to talk about his major and then to Lowe’s to see about J hooks or U bolts or somesuch for the new toolbox. I drank way too much coffee this morning to compensate for lack of sleep and ended up with the shakes because I didn’t eat. So, I ate my leftover chicken tortellini just now. I’m so tired, but I’ve got things to do as well. I need to make a call to pay off a rather large debt of mine, do some laundry (*groan*) and some serious cleaning. Obviously, I’m ignoring all of those demands by blogging, uploading photos and creating slideshows.

Later tonight, I am going to meet up with some people from Ravelry to do some knitting together. I’m excited. I haven’t met new people in real life in quite some time! Plus, they all enjoy the same crafts I do and have gobs more experience, so I look forward to learning lots.

I’d be finished by now because the boy has been playing quietly, letting me do my thing. I turn around to see what he’s up to, and well, it was just so darling, I had to get out the camera:

While I am here, I meant to share this cute one from the other day. Daddy got Buddha to fall asleep in his arms. These types of things are really, really rare for our little guy.

My supplies and yarn stash!