Yeah, I understand the issues around Keystone, but really, what choice do we have (in North America) at this point? I work for oil and gas, of course, so I’m biased.
ETA: Man I hate that term ‘tar’ sands. It’s not TAR, for crying out loud! It’s bitumen - OIL. OIL SANDS!
We have two flies in the living room right now. I’ve never wanted to squish the life out of a living creature this much before.
Kill them.
Flies have no intrinsic value except as food/prey for other species. To us they are only pests and disease carriers.
I was annoyed while taking a shower and shaved my arm pits way to close. Then I applied deodorant. EEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
Phones apparently hate me. I replaced my old dumb phone that would die whenever you made a call, with no warning, with a new smart phone. Android. Shiny. Good battery.
And now I can’t make calls on it. It crashes every time I try. I am not happy.
Miniscule rant - one of my fave reads on a blogging site has removed me from her friends list, which means I can only now read her public entries, and I suspect I’m missing out on a bunch of friends-locked stuff just now, as she’s gone quiet, but normally updates everyday.
I respect that she’s a Real Person ™ with real privacy issues, but it still feels like missing episodes of a TV programme and having to pick up later with no idea of what you’ve missed!
Ugh. I’m sick and tired of musicians with perfect pitch thinking they’re superior to those of them, like me, who don’t have perfect pitch.
(Perfect pitch is the ability to name any note, or to sing any note without external guidance.)
I’ve known many musicians with perfect pitch, and many without it, and each group is as good as the other.
What I’m really tired of is perfect-pitch musicians showing off their abilities by putting up ads for themselves as music teachers, and mentioning their perfect pitch in the ad as a “qualification”, as though that automatically makes them a better teacher than a musician without perfect pitch. It DOESN’T make them more qualified as a teacher. GET OVER IT.
(And no, I’m not just jealous because I don’t have perfect pitch. I’m just angry at people lording their abilities/talents/gifts/whatever over those who don’t have them.)
Sorry for the rant. This just really bugs me.
Are you talking about the anti-Keystone FB share I mentioned?
If so, I just found it on his page and it was linked from Platzner Post.
I’m trying not to post that rant every time someone calls them tar sands (and often failing). 
I must hang out with the right people – I’ve only heard the phrase “oil sands”.
What the hell is it with me and car chargers for phones? There is one around here someplace for my mom’s phone, but I can’t find it. I have located two chargers for my old phone (in separate vehicles), and one for my old Compaq iPaq. Grr.
I used to know how to get pics from my phone to an online account so I could share them with the world. Now that my phone is smarter than me, I can’t do it.
However, if both sorts of phones are having the same problem, I’m wondering about your coverage. I have dead spots in my home, which offends me because one of them is by the window in my bedroom…which has a lovely view of the cell tower.
No, but I’d probably laugh at it. I can’t figure out how to get the pics of the hardcore protesters (the ones with the pillows) from my droid to a share place.
Actually, I had some wait time today and instead of reading, I started playing with my phone and I might have gotten it figured out.
Oops, sorry for the double post, I forgot my rant.
Everytime I go outside at home, I get swarmed by mosquitoes. I’ve been watching purplehorseshoe’s thread so of course I don’t want to get West Nile, even though it hasn’t gotten here yet. Paranoid is me!
I also don’t like getting bit by those things anyhow. I hates being ichy. I am very careful to not have standing water, after the summer storms, I always walk my yard and check to be sure that everything is draining.
Last night, I remembered that Crazy Neighbor Lady has one of those above ground pools for when her grandkids visit. The grandkids rarely visit and never use the pool. When I asked her about it, because we live in the middle of the desert and have water rationing, she told me that she was willing to pay to keep it filled because it entices her grandkids to visit.
So…this morning, I drove up the last road on the mountain and looked down at our homes. CNL has a cover over her pool that is filled with greenish brown water. I just know that is where the mosquitoes are breeding. Oh great. If I say anything, she will get upset and start doing her screaming thing again. Its been so nice and quiet lately.
I have perfect/absolute pitch (ducks), and I would actually prefer a teacher who didn’t have it. The flip side of this ability, at least for me: I have horrible relative pitch. It’s incredibly hard for me to think in terms of intervals, or transpose anything, or imagine a piece of music without actual names of notes, and I feel like it’s been a real hindrance to developing any significant understanding of music theory. Just looking at solfege gives me a headache. Don’t get me wrong, being able to produce notes on command or identify what pitch the refrigerator is humming at is kind of cool, but more in a party trick kind of way. Yeah, you can identify when you’re out of tune, but that doesn’t mean you’re any better at consistently fixing it.
My music teacher didn’t, but apparently she thought she did: while she was a great teacher in many ways, once I figured out that the first note in her dictations was always supposed to be a La I wasn’t sure whether to kill myself or her :smack: My dictation grades moved from 0 to 100 once I knew where to start, as her full-notes were full-notes and her halves were halves, but often when she was trying to hit a specific note she would be a full note high.
Having perfect pitch is no requirement either to be a musician or to teach music but damnit, one should know whether one has it or doesn’t!
It’s a bit like “native” for teaching language: it may mean your accent/pronunciation/dialect is native (depending on where you’re from or where you’ve been living, it may simply be messy), but it doesn’t necessarily make you good at explaining grammar or at teaching pronunciation.
When she’s out, can you sneak some chlorine, or diluted bleach or something, that will kill the larvae into the pool?
(not anything that would hurt the kids, obviously, even though the chances of them wanting to swim in the greeny brown water is limited!)
Today’s mini-rant, one of my friends contacted me last night to give me an update on the former husbands latest, so once again I had a night full of nightmares about him. It’s completely my fault, in this case I had actually asked her to let me know something, but stupid brain not letting me have a restful night.
How about Mosquito Dunks? You can just chuck one of those into the pool.
No, totally different problems. The old phone was at least 15 years old and the battery was going bad. It wouldn’t hold a charge. The new phone fixed itself last night while it was charging, so it’s all good.
I sit in a cube farm on the end of a row of six. So I have four people behind me, one across the aisle. For some reason, everyone behind me feels compelled to pat my cube when they walk by. I don’t get this. Why are you patting my cube, dammit?? Are you making sure I’m awake? Do you not notice that I spend a good six hours a day on conference calls? I get that I have no expectation of silence working in a cube farm, but knock it the hell off!
Do they have vector control in your town/county? If so you could drop a dime on her anonymously.
Good idea, K’sdad. Not to mention, if she doesn’t have a good fence with a lockable gate, it’s a drowning hazard, and there might be something in the local ordinances about that.