whither summer?

Target has shrunk their summer things down to one pathetic little aisle and have had the back-to-school stuff out for a couple of weeks now. The lady at Lowe’s told me the citronella oil lanterns just inside the entrance were all they had left and that they’d be going on clearance soon.

It’s July.

This constant pushing ahead, pretending it’s two months later than it really is, drives me up a wall. What do you do when a hose springs a leak and you need to replace it in August? When your bathing suit tears? When a tree branch levels your patio table? You’re SOL, because you’re not going to find replacements in the stores.

Why do we have this urge to live in the future instead of enjoying the present? To push and push and push, until Christmas ornaments are out before Halloween, swimsuits hit the stores in February, and annuals appear at the home stores weeks before they can survive in this climate.

Don’t get me wrong. Project management is one of my things, and I understand needing to plan ahead and all that, but it’s getting ridiculous.

I want to live in the here and now, to not mourn summer before its time, to enjoy every last sunshiny breeze and juicy downpour.

open letter for 27 August 2008

Dear Clothing Manufacturers,

I am perfectly capable of layering a sweater over a shirt. I really don’t need you to create deceptive garments that look like two separate items but are in fact some weird not-shirt/not-sweater. At some point I will get too warm and will want to take off that sweater, but I will be foiled in the attempt by your devious clothing mashup. That Macy’s buyer must have owed you a mighty big favor…

Oh, and while you’re at it, how about some full-length sleeves? If I want them to be shorter, I’ll push them up.

Thanks,
Lori

more weirdness

And now we can add to that last post that all of a sudden my photo, Etsy mini, and Flickr badge are now all missing from my sidebar. I’m just not equipped to deal with this today.

electronic weirdness

Not sure what is going on, but there seems to be some kind of capricious, selective electronic vortex surrounding my house.

I have been trying to get to marthastewart.com for three days now to access a couple articles of interest, but it will not let me get there. I get a “server not responding” error, no matter what browser I use. I have not found any other website that behaves this way. My husband tried last night from his PC laptop and his Palm and wasn’t able to make a connection either, although he was able to connect from the same laptop at work this morning. I’ve asked a few other people to try from assorted computers and locations, and they can all get in fine. I’ve cleared my cache and cookies; unplugged everything from the cable modem, router, and Vongage box and let them all rest for 20 minutes; restarted my computer — all to no avail.

Now, the really weird thing is that I can get to some things on the subdomain blogs1.marthastewart.com (Martha Blog, Dinner Tonight, and Bluelines [oh, alas for the demise of the printed Blueprint]), but not others (Bride’s Guide).

What little I understand of my net search results seems to point to something in the router’s firewall (although the site was working just fine last week), but I know next to nothing about networking and firewalls and am terrified to tackle this on my own lest I really mess something up (my net access is critical to my business, whereas access to Martha specifically is not). I’ll just have to wait until my IT guy can take a look at it.

Then, early this morning, my phone made a really weird beep and all of a sudden I had messages — eight of them, going back to late last week, all of them new to me. But in the meantime, I have received a few calls and checked voicemail. I don’t get a lot of calls, so it didn’t occur to me that I might be missing any. Apparently I was.

If I’m wearing a tinfoil hat next time you see me, you’ll know why.

lost

For some reason, I have not been able to send e-mail through my mail program since yesterday afternoon. It started with my virtuallori.com account, then worked its way through all my others. I can receive mail just fine; I just can’t send. Nothing in my settings has changed; all use the correct username and password, and are set to use authentication and the proper port. And my webmail (as much as I hate it) is working. It’s a mystery.

weirdness

I’m a little weird. People who know me know this, and I do, too.

But is it really all that strange that I don’t like blobs of mushy fruit in my yogurt? That I like fruit yogurt — not merely “fruit-flavored” — but that I really prefer the fruit to be smoothly pureed so as to blend with the smooth yogurty goodness? Combine this with my absolute abhorrence of all types of artificial sweetener, and, well, it makes it hard to shop.

Yoplait indulges me in this regard with its custard-style line, but I am worried about the future of our relationship. It seems that every time I go to the store, another flavor has vanished. Whither mixed berry? Blackberry?

I fear that soon I will have resort to buying some other kind (I do love the taste — if not the texture — of the Stonybrook Farm organics) and running it through the blender before I eat it. Kind of takes the convenience factor away, though.

%&^*ing spammers

I’ve turned on comment moderation, which I hope will stop the comment spam. Sorry for the inconvenience.