….but i appear to be slowly rising from the ashes of non-blogginess.

emphasis on “slowly”….

gah. my weird life. gimme some time.

~d~

i had three posts in the works for the March 19 Blogswarm, and as it happened, i neglected to have them saved in the Wordpress database. thanks to some beta software on this computer, when i hybernated the computer because three realtors were bringing prospective buyers through our house yesterday (one of whom didn’t call first like he’s supposed to, no less), the system didn’t wake up. the resulting hard reboot lost me a bout two hours of blog-work. go figure. i ALWAYS save drafts, or draft in a text editor. but not yesterday (or night before last, for that matter). i think this whole selling-the-house-and-preparing-to-move shin-dig has me pretty scattered. never a dull freakin’ moment, anyway.

i feel compelled, though, to follow up with some notes on the day, because as inferred yesterday, the current Iraq war hits a bit close to home for me as a Gulf War veteran. not that i think my personal considerations on it are any more important or dynamic than those who have served or are serving in the current war, but that i had given my word to support the blogswarm endeavor, and failed to adequately do so. the chagrin-meter leans heavily to the right.

so naturally, when the realtors were done traipsing through the house and not giving us an offer immediately, and when the children were finally tucked into bed, and after i’d finished up some client work, i at least managed to get out and do some reading. one of the things that quickly struck me was that {insert almost any other blogger’s online identity or blog name here} writes better than me, and i’m not just talking about the presumably-appropriate use of capital letters. i still had a lot of what i’d written in my head, and i could have theoretically replicated my previous efforts, but after an hour or so of reading, i realized how redundant that would have been. great minds think alike after all, although putting myself in their company is probably a bit dishonest. so instead, on the off-chance that you might have missed some of these fine posts, allow me to serve you by including a brief synposis and link to their thoughts, witticisms and insights.

some notes from my overnight readings

the more you blog, the more you toot.

something like that, anyway.

Some unshaven simian has cursed me—i mean, tagged me—with the gratuitously insipid middle name meme.

TEH RULEZ, as copied from the accursed simian’s blog:

1. You have to post the rules before you give your answers.
2. You must list one fact about yourself beginning with each letter of your middle name. (If you don’t have a middle name, use your maiden name or your mother’s maiden name).
3. At the end of your blog post, you need to tag one person (or blogger of another species) for each letter of your middle name. (Be sure to leave them a comment telling them they’ve been tagged.)

it is potentially of note that the simian in question did not comply with rule #3, and i only happened to notice the tagging of me by virtue of my dutiful inspection of his RSS feed. i guess he’s busy with his campaign and all. pfft. whatever.

like the aforementioned simian, i don’t follow rules, because rules are for the mindless masses who fail to recognize that exercising one’s free will in support of the greater good is beneficial. besides, why try to start setting a good example for my children now? not to mention the fact that “Dawnne” is one of my middle names already, and both it and the other one are too short to be “fun”, at least not in my opinion.

so, for the purposes of this meme, my middle name is “POOPYHEAD”, chosen for both its appropriate attribution in my case, and of course for its inherent sense of maturity and acumen.

· P ~ Pr0n. one of my first contracts when i was just starting out in the self-employed world was to code a database-driven image-delivery system for a pornography website. the cheap bastards never made their final payment, but were i to re-activate a certain email address, i could see how much it was being used. last time i checked, the system was installed on over 15,000 websites! fame! fortune! o wait…. i would have told the bastards to go fuck themselves, but i figure doing what they do for a living, they probably do that enough anyway.
· O ~ Objectivity. i am, actually, fairly objective. i consider it one of my finer qualities. i don’t consider myself to be perfectly consistent in this category, but i’m fairly (pardon the pun) conscientious about it.
· O ~ Omnivore. this is the fault of the Spouse Unit (aka Mrs. Other). when we met, i largely consumed cheap beer and dead cows with the occasional chicken. now, i actually eat my vegetables and fruits, drink wine, and catch myself from time to time actually wanting a salad.
· P ~ Poopyhead. no explanation required, i’m sure. what, you expected more? sue me.
· Y ~ . fuck. i just HAD to pick a word with “Y” in it, didn’t i? ummm…. YouTube. there ya go. as in, i watch some shit on YouTube but since i’m too goddamned lazy to videotape anything, i never contribute.
· H ~ Hungry. i really suck at making sure i have a good breakfast each morning, and here it is nearly 1:00 p.m. and i still haven’t eaten.
· E ~ Entelligent. as exemplified by my awesome speling skillz, i am extremely entelligent and thoroughly dedicated to taking memes seriously.
· A ~ Asshole. as pretty much exemplified by every post on the otherwhirled. so, bite me.
· D ~ Dumbass. this is what i will, no doubt, continue to be until #1 Son is somewhere in his 20’s, after which i will suddenly and mysteriously become insightful.

YOU ARE HEREBY TAGGIFIED: don’t argue with me. just do it.

1. Adam H
2. DolciDeleria
3. Stringer
4. Sorghum Crow
5. black marks on wood pulp
6. Daughter The First
7. The Spouse Unit
8. Scott

crap. that’s enough already. i’m pretty sure the rest of you on the blogroll (which i still need to fix here and resynchronize with the otherwhirled) have already been tagged.

The premier liberal/progressive blogging event of the year is just EIGHT SHORT DAYS AWAY! If you’re interested in participating, catch the details over at BlueGal’s site or at the blogswarm’s blog. And if you haven’t already, make sure you bookmark the Blog Against Theocracy website so you can easily stay in tune with the swarm throughout the event (and after!)

The logo above is provided courtesy of Tengrain at Mock, Paper, Scissors. He also has a presized “sidebar” version for your convenience. Tengrain reminds us:

The theme, like always, is the Separation of Church and State — we are for it. But the variations on the theme are many, and we scored the widest range of responses. This is not a bashing of religion - peeps can believe what they choose, however they choose — but it is a reminder that the Government should keep out of religion, and Religion should keep out of the government. A great resource for ideas can be found at our good friends, First Freedom First. Many of you know FFF already. They are not sponsors of the Blog Against Theocracy swarm, but they should be beneficiaries.

I will go one step further to point out that the anti-theocratic movement is one point of agreement between atheists, agnostics, humanists, and persons of various religious beliefs, all of whom recognize and appreciate the need for government’s firm separation from specific religious doctrine and preferential treatment. Not only do I firmly support the premise that this blogswarm is not about bashing religion, but I hope to see a strong community grow out of this endeavor over the years: A global community of like-minded critical thinkers who can respectfully, but adamantly, argue against the practice of inserting any form of preferential treatment for any religious belief into our governments.

I will be participating in the blogswarm from the otherwhirled with my usual image-based snarkery (because it’s okay to be snarky about this, provided the snark isn’t meaningless or antagonistic), from perpetual dawnne (with some real-live bona-fide actual thoughts written down and stuff that I’m already working on because it takes me that long to write meaningful stuff), and I am also hoping to participate photographically from Synthaetica Digitography (because, seriously, why do anything but blog? blogging is all there is! blog!!! blog!!!) Some of my contributions will be cross-posted to Mock, Paper, Scissors, but I am also hoping to write at least one unique thing for the mighty SCISSORHEADS.

I hope that you all will make some time to participate and read the many insightful posts that the swarm will have. You’re welcome to use the button below to subscribe to the blogswarm’s feed!

(cross-posted to the otherwhirled and Synthaetica Digitography)

…or not…

that some basic things have changed over at the otherwhirled—that other meta-incarnation of Dawnne that keeps him from going crazy.

as a result of coming out of the closet in terms of my atheism over there, some things are going to change over here, just probably not at the same level. one reason for the difference between the two is that functionally, in my personal life, my agnostic atheism is of no tangible import. in other words, between myself and my family, who share my worldview, it’s “eh, big deal”, and rarely ever discussed.

on the other hand, my agnostic atheism is exactly what drives my quest—my philosophical investigation, in truth—for better self-understanding. and that’s largely because i recognize the need for self-understanding before one can feasibly attempt to understand others. but you could also exchange the word “philosophical” above for “spiritual”, and that sentence would basically read the same, in my eyes.

and i’m tired of not including that quest here. it has only partly been because of the inherent juxtaposition between time allocated to blogging and time allocated to work. but the reality is, my work life isn’t very likely to get any less time-consuming within the next decade or more, so i might as well just schedule some time in and devote it accordingly.

which, i have done.

the snarkery side of it will remain on the otherwhirled, but given the diverse readership and the gross amount of visitors on the otherwhirled compared to perpetual dawnne, the otherwhirled was the proper place for a formal announcement of the matter. however, as i begin sharing my path to this point, such posts will be here on perpetual dawnne, because of their relevance to who i am, and their general lack of cathartic expression.

make sense? i hope so.

i imagine, because of the depth of time involved (a near-eternity in comparison to her normal communications when i have managed to contrive a what-the-fuck moment), that i have managed to offend at least one long-time reader and friend of these blogs. sadly, all i can offer in that regard: please try to think beyond what you’ve accepted as truth, because you know there’s little basis for it as “truth”.

seriously.

but i will continue to love, admire, and respect you regardless of how you ingest what i wrote over there.

we are back from the frozen wastelands of slightly-north-of-here. despite being this far north (relative to the residences of many of my readers), this was our first “truly white” Christmas in several years. yeah, yeah, yeah…there’s been snow on the ground the last few years…snow like somebody went and opened a fifty-pound bag of flour over every square mile. this year, there were actually a few inches of sun-and-wind-skinned snow setting, and some appreciable drifts courtesy of the wind.

it was an early Christmas this year, thanks once again to the sisters’ conflicting work schedules. one of my brothers-in-law got half the family sick because of something he brought along with him after having gotten it from one of his kids. so our short, early Christmas rapidly became a care center for the stricken: my other brother-in-law, my son, and both of my parents-in-law. i knock on wood several times a day.

i am trying to pump out the blog transfer for the otherwhirled and synthaetica, but i have experienced a wordpress import problem that may ultimately require me to do the import directly from the database. in fact, i should probably just do that and scrub the support ticket. it’s been a while since i did something completely databasey, anyway.

and, for what it’s worth, i know this will eventually come up in searches for wordpress+'import & problem'which is by no means the point of this post. but in case that happens, i hope you read down to this to discover me saying “the wordpress import problem is probably somewhere in my php.ini, the default installation of which is an excellent example of too much information in the way of code-comments provided in the file.” because if it wouldn’t be such a butt-pain to read without all the comments, but my limited understanding of regular expressions keeps me from making that available in any sort of responsible, feasible time. besides which, i’m not really confident of the intrinsic, ongoing, and long-term benefit of seeing that file as just a bunch of settings with no explanations. heh. i’ll just have to sit down and read the whole damn thing one of these days, but….*yawn*….

anyway, we are back, except for #1 Daughter, who is continuing her annual stay with her grandparents, who always enjoy her company. she’ll be coming back on New Year’s Eve, i believe. and we are back, but will quite likely be moving—out of this house at a very likely minimum, and possibly even out of the state. it’s all rather hypothetical right now, but the bottom lines are fairly simple. the Spouse Unit is getting laid off where she works, and some of her best job opportunities could potentially lead us to “follow the money” to places as far apart as Santa Clara, CA to Colorado Springs, CO to Minneapolis, MN to somewhere in Florida. Colorado Springs would be our preferred area if our current location isn’t an option, although Minneapolis would put us closer to the Spouse Unit’s sisters.

but even that aside, the other bottom line is the fact that even after putting a lot of money down on this house when we moved here, the inherent limitations on how much i can make when working almost entirely alone coupled with the fact that companies out here do not come even close to compensating intelligent, well-educated females for what they’re actually worth is forcing us to consider selling this house and moving into town. None of us want to do that, but since we put so much down on the house (which was actually a very good idea on the time, just one that was based primarily on the expectation that it’d take the Spouse Unit about six months to get hired. instead, it took almost 18. and then her layoff comes at the bottom of the bell curve of my business cycle (not many people get married in the winter, and soccer’s not a good game when it’s less than 40 degrees. cold-weather injuries are a bitch).

so, it looks very strongly like we’re moving. we just have to figure out how not to make it an entirely bad thing for #1 Son and #1 Daughter. the photo is from our current front porch just this morning. several retouch methods, obviously. predictably, with the prospect of moving looming over us, i will be more inclined to document the views for what little time i have remaining.

congratulations to my father, by the way. it took the VA until just this past Monday to finally award him 50% disability with back-pay. it should have been at least 75%, but now that he has finally been awarded something, the paperwork, while considerable, is much easier to file. i’m glad you finally got something out of them, Dad. hang in there!

as in, “back in 3 days.”

happy holidays, all!!!