I don’t think I can say it enough. I love Ikea. With the exception of about three things, our entire house is has been furnished by the good company of Sweden. Some of my favorite new purchases include this lamp and these chairs. In red, of course.
I bought this book: Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional by Simon Collison with a gift card over the summer. It’s fantastic! I am a complete novice with this sort of thing, but I’m learning quickly thanks to this book. Thanks to Collison, I’ll never forget to top center my background image again.
If you like playing with color and color palettes, you’ll love this site - Colour Lovers. I’m playing with a blog redesign right now and it’s the perfect place to create a palette. Fun!
Happy New Year! I think of you both often. Have made the transition to vegetarianism. Maybe vegan one day. It’s a process. I love the challenge to be creative and the health benefits as well. Come to Austin and visit me sometime.
Karen
Okay, so I am coming to this way late, but I just wanted to commiserate on the Money Pit situation. We are considering selling our house next year just to avoid putting in a new roof and furnace. I know I don’t want to stay in this house for another five or so years, so I know we’d never get our money back (we’d have to finance those repairs). Well, there are other reasons why we want to sell but those are big ones. As it stands now we have a huge To Do list just to get the house ready to show. Ugh.
GREAT letter! But I was shocked to see the notebook paper with FIVE HOLES! At a Catholic school? No wonder you Mount Saint Joe’s/Joe Paradox chicks were completely out of control!
I would still love to do a little “wax on wax off” with Ralph Macchio.
I want an Adipose. I can’t stop looking at pictures of Adipose. I might need an Adipose intervention.
For those unfamiliar, this
is an Adipose. A marshmallowy creature who survives and spawns in a human host. I would totally host an Adipose and put the human race in danger if I could have one of these little snaggletoothed blobs walking around my house, squeaking.
Since Adipose aren’t real, I will have to settle for any or all of the following to satisfy my Adipose obsession. As you peruse, please imagine me screeching “I want an Adipose! I want you to get me an Adipose right away!” in my best Veruca Salt twenty or thirty times in a row and see how fast you get me an Adipose just to shut me up.
If you’re not completely convinced by now that Adipose are the cutest things in the whole wide world, there must be something very wrong with you. Stand close and I’ll use my sonic screwdriver to try to fix you.
A schedule. Yeah, that’s it. That’s the ticket. A schedule will help me post more! Let’s give Music Mondays a try, shall we? (I know, I know. It’s corny, but roll with me.)
iPod on shuffle. First five songs. Here goes:
“I Made it Through The Rain” by Barry Manilow. Great song, made better by Captain Jack Harkness. (for Audra)
“Hold On” - Green Day
“One More Try” - Richard Marx
“Too Much Heaven” - The Bee Gees
“Utopia” - Alanis Morrissette
Trivia Question: On what popular after-school Canadian television show did Alanis Morrissette appear? (The same television show that featured Christine “Moose” McGlade, who denied her identity when I recognized her at a Grateful Dead show in the late 1980s. Yes, I was at a Grateful Dead show. No, I’m not proud of that fact.)
Correct answer-ers will be entered into this week’s prize drawing. Answer in the comments or email me at joeparadox at gmail dot com!
Raise your hand if your blog is covered with cobwebs since Facebook, Twitter, and every other microblogging website came along! Both hands high in the air, here.
With summer vacation comes plenty of time for me to march around the internet, visiting all of the blogs I rarely get to read during busy work months. While Facebook and Twitter have kept me connected with people, I truly miss reading and commenting on my favorite blogs. I miss the excitement I always felt when my email inbox showed a new comment on a recent entry, and I miss the exercise of writing. I used to have so much to say, but I got sucked into the vortex of immediate gratification that social networking provides.
In an effort to rekindle my romance with joeparadox.com, I decided to try to teach myself some semblance of blog design. I wouldn’t dare say “web” design, because about the only thing I can do right now is some CSS and a little bit of functional coding. So, I’m learning. Over the last week or so, I plugged away at a new design and for the first time I was able to complete one that works in both Firefox and Explorer. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but it actually looks better in Explorer. I figured out how to make transparent gifs for the first time, which was sort of a breakthrough in my understanding of how this all works. This new design isn’t perfect and it’s not professional, but I like it and I feel pretty good about what I was able to teach myself. If you want to see it, check out the “Slip me some skin” drop-down menu in the sidebar and choose “Blue Plate Special.” There it is.
With this new design comes new ideas for this blog. Lately I’ve gotten really tired of all the navelgazing that pervades the internet. Cryptic facebook updates meant to “intrigue” really just scream, “I need attention! Look at me! Notice me!” And I guess I’m just a little weary of the Dooces of the world and their macro photos of baby wipe warmers on their blogs. Now I’ll totally contradict myself by saying that I love reading diarist blog posts of people I know and have followed for many years, and I enjoy writing them, too, but I really prefer the commenting and discussion that an interesting or entertaining blog entry can provoke. That’s where I’m going here.
A serious effort will be made, people! To update! Yes, from time to time, there will be pictures of the cats and stories about the various levels of destruction and havoc that they wreak on us and our home. There will be TARCon stories and celebrity encounters. But there will be more. There will be more frequent trivia questions and games. And prizes! Everyone likes prizes, right? I’m going to try to review some of my favorite vegan (and non-vegan) products and recipes. And, I’ll probably be talking more about interesting things in general, and I hope you’ll leave your thoughts in the comments.
If you’re still reading this blog, thanks for sticking with me. I hope you find something here to entertain you, inform you, or at the very least, occupy you until you regenerate enough energy to do more jobs on your favorite Facebook game.
And we’re off! The theme for this summer’s trivia is television and movie characters (including reality tv contestants). For each quiz, I’ll provide the names of five characters, and all you have to do is name the show they were on. There’s a hitch - the letters of the characters’ first and last names will be scrambled! I’ll place an asterisk to indicate how many letters in the first and last names...FOR NOW!
In case you’re wondering why this entry looks identical to the last one you may have read, it’s because I heeded my good friend Sheri‘s advice and scrambled up the first and last names separately, instead of together. A bit easier - it is summer, after all!
There will be prizes again! The first person to answer the quiz correctly will win an iTune of their choice. Answers (character names and the name of the show) can be emailed to me at joeparadox AT gmail DOT com, or posted in the comments section of the blog entry. Have fun y’all!
1. N Y Y D S E * B I T O R S W
2. S H R A A L M L * N M F N I K L A
3. J C K A * I W R T S B O
4. U I A J L N * K A S R
5. M A L E I H C * H N A V G U
Good luck!
Summer vacation has begun, officially! And you know what that means!
Trivia and games and quizzes are certainly on their way. Last year I bit off a bit more than I could chew with my 80s video tournament. It seemed like a grand idea at the time, but my overzealous ambition (not to mention a touch of OCD) got the best of me. In the end, I made the executive decision to declare a-ha’s “Take On Me” the best video of the 80s, since we took Thriller out of the running at the very beginning.
This year I promise to return to my roots and provide you with the kinds of fun, finish-able trivia quizzes to which you’ve become accustomed, here on joeparadox.com. I’m not sure yet what they’ll be, so stay tuned!
From the entry 'Resolutions for 2010', Karen Hutson said:
Danielle and Tony:
Happy New Year! I think of you both often. Have made the transition to vegetarianism. Maybe vegan one day. It’s a process. I love the challenge to be creative and the health benefits as well. Come to Austin and visit me sometime.
Karen
From the entry 'Just Say No', Fran said:
Regarding “sleeps,” is “1-2-3 seepies”
still okay? I am going to keep saying it
no matter what!
From the entry 'An Update!', andrea said:
Okay, so I am coming to this way late, but I just wanted to commiserate on the Money Pit situation. We are considering selling our house next year just to avoid putting in a new roof and furnace. I know I don’t want to stay in this house for another five or so years, so I know we’d never get our money back (we’d have to finance those repairs). Well, there are other reasons why we want to sell but those are big ones. As it stands now we have a huge To Do list just to get the house ready to show. Ugh.
Congrats on the new job too.
From the entry 'My Letter to Ralph Macchio', Fran said:
Hey, Deebers,
GREAT letter! But I was shocked to see the notebook paper with FIVE HOLES! At a Catholic school? No wonder you Mount Saint Joe’s/Joe Paradox chicks were completely out of control!
I would still love to do a little “wax on wax off” with Ralph Macchio.
Fran
From the entry 'My Letter to Ralph Macchio', Anita said:
^what he said!