The Naked Guy

Got up at the usual hour, dragged my sorry self out of bed, got ready for work, let the dog out into the backyard.... Everything is normal, and then I see the naked guy.

I can't be sure he's completely naked because he's on the other side of the fence, in my back-door neighbor's yard. He's at least not wearing a shirt, and it's only about 40 degrees out there. And he's decidedly not my neighbor, who is not tall enough to be viewed so plainly over the fence.

Obviously, I'm curious about this fella, who appears to be staring in the back door of the neighbor's house. My first thought is that he's a pervert, perpetrating a sex crime right there in my (well, almost) backyard. Then I wonder if he belongs there & I'm over-reacting like a nosy neighbor.

Either way, I wonder exactly what I'm supposed to do. I figure running out into my yard and yelling, "Hey, you pervert, get away from that door!" is probably not a good choice. I can't really see far enough, well enough, to decide whether he is a threat. However, before I get the phone out for a little 9-1-1 action, I figure I ought to be prepared to answer when the dispatcher asks, "What is your emergency?".

So I grab my trusty binoculars and try to look out the window in such a way that if the pervert turns his head, he can't see that I'm looking at him through binoculars. And that's when I see...

...that he is just a life-size mannequin standing on the back porch. I first saw him Monday morning. He's still there, freezing his sorry butt off out there. I'm awfully glad I took a moment to use the binocs before I sent some of Montgomery County's finest over there with guns drawn and adrenaline all rushing. I can just see the headline in the local paper on *that* police report:

Nosy neighbor reports peeping tom in neighbor's backyard. Officers respond to find that both she & the alleged perpetrator are BIG DUMMIES.

Birthday fun

What I did on my (ahem) 24th birthday:
-- Went to the Apple store. Looked at iPod Touch, Looked at iPhone. Looked at iPod Touch again. Looked at iPhone again. Repeat until noon.
-- Ate lunch
-- Went home. Plugged new iPhone (happy birthday to me!) into the Mac and got her activated. WOOHOO!! Everything works and is oh so wonderful except -- the phone part. Gotta love A&T. Apparently they were messing with the network in Houston, or so the phone support bimbo informed me. I find on the Internet a solution & restart the 'network.' Phone works :)
-- Installed new Leopard operating system & iLife on the Mac. Smooth as glass.
-- Watched dad clean my gutters. Send iPhone photos of this to my brother in Brazil, via iPhone mail program. Happy birthday to me!
-- Ate pizza.
-- Texted brother & fiancee just to play with the iPhone.

It's cool. I'm *such* a geekette.

LinkedIn

I don't remember how I stumbled into it, but I've located yet another "Social Network," this one called LinkedIn. Call it Facebook for boring old grown-ups. That is to say, it is where I have found most of my current & former colleagues & friends. Unfortunately, it's boring. It's like going to a convention & having no fascinating speakers, no fun dinner parties, no drinks at the bar, just one enormous poster session of everybody's resumes. Yawn!

I suppose if I were looking for a job, it would be the hot ticket. If I were looking to hire someone, it might be the hot ticket, too. In fact, I think I found it because there was a post on one of my Facebook groups about a job opportunity available by visiting someone's LinkedIn profile. I wasn't interested in the job, but I was curious about LinkedIn. Go figure.

Anyway, it's sad to say that I have more 'connections' on LinkedIn after a couple of days than I do on Facebook after a couple of weeks. I believe this means I am old (sigh) How did that happen?

Facebook is more fun. My birthday is ... soon. I'll be 24. Again. One of these days, I'm going to get it right.

I have my shots

I feel like I am a dog when I say that I went with my parents to get our shots yesterday. (I would have blogged immediately afterward, but Blogger was down...)

In another 9 days, I will be immune from Yellow Fever, one of those nasty mosquito-borne diseases that you only have to worry about in tropical climes. Houston is, apparently, not tropical enough. But some parts of Brazil are, which is why mom, dad & I paddled up through the wet weather yesterday to get Yellow Fever vaccinations. They are not required for the places we are headed, but they have been recommended. So we got 'em.

Unlike some shots (I think the flu shot may be one) where the nurse tries to jab the needle deep into a muscle, the Yellow Fever shot is subcutaneous -- just under the skin. Or so the nurse said as she looked at me, the brave one, going first. "It will bubble a bit," she added.

"Bubble?" I asked as she stuck the needle just under the skin of my forearm and started pushing the plunger.

"Bubble" was the perfect word for it. It was like a ripple as the fluid was injected in there, ripping one layer of skin from whatever skin is attached to under there. And thus, it did not feel great. But it was cool to see, and I was busily letting my eyes keep my brain from noticing the pain when dad suddenly spoke.

"Did you *watch*?!" His voice was a mixture of surprise, horror and respect.

"Of course I watched. It was totally cool," I responded. "Was I not supposed to watch?"

Mom, next up, responded. "I can assure you that I'm not going to watch."

In fact, mom looked completely away and winced. "It huuuurts!"

"It's like a bee sting," I offered helpfully.

"Big damn bee," mom responded tersely.

Dad avers that it did not hurt at all. He did not, however, watch the bubbling. He claims that once the needle was in, he watched it all, but by the time he turned his head, it was all over. Ask the nurse. She'll tell you.

And it did *not* hurt that much. But it itches like a sun-of-a-gun now.

Is it me?

I'm struggling with the word "modest," myself. If you blog, can you really be said to be 'modest'?

Also, some 2/3 of all people who have visited the site have been paired with lions. Is this a statement about the kind of people who are on the "New Line Productions" e-mail list, or people who are interested in 'fantasy' type stories?

Edited: Hey, I just changed into a ferret!

Friends & Twits

So how's this for irony in the digital age: My first 'friend' on Facebook is a neighbor. Sorta. Well, he lives in The Woodlands and has a dog, so I've probably actually at least seen him at a dog park. Or walking the dog. Or not. Anyway, he founded the Facebook "Pet Owners of The Woodlands" group, and after I posted a picture of Lakrids on there, this fella 'friended' me. I feel so (sniff) friendly!

I also got 'poked' by a perfect stranger, which was worth a giggle. I poked her back. I hope that was the right thing to do heh.

My second friend is a real friend, albeit one from work and one who lives in Brazil. I wrote to him in Danish, saying my Danish is miles better than my Portuguese (I really gotta get back to those Rosetta Stone exercises before the Unnamed Male Relative's wedding in November.) My Brazilian friend doesn't speak Danish. So naturally, he wrote back in French. It's a fun world...

Meanwhile in real life, another friend from work (who happens to live in Kilgore, Texas) was in town yesterday to take a class, so we had dinner & the world's margaritas. He's the fella who -- oh my goodness, I never blogged about that adventure (#2 on this link). Briefly, he let me operate a piece of coveted machinery on a job site, which I will blog about another day. I giggled like a girl about being allowed to do this, and he & his cohorts were greatly amused. I've since made him famous in print, which made him smile.

All the while, people have been "tweeting" on Twitter. Feel free to call me a "twit" for falling into it, but it reminds me of the best part of old 1980s chatting, but even better -- because if you log off & go to sleep, all the messages from people overnight are there waiting for you in the morning.

It's a sickness. I think you either 'get' it or you don't. I'm not sure I 'get' it in the long term, but it's a giggle at the moment. There's something very amusing about the fact that my very first 'follower' was Robert Scoble.. If you don't know who that is, then you probably won't 'get' Twitter, anyway.

Old People in Social Media

Egged on by something I read on the Internet recently, I decided to try some Social Media sites. I had already joined myRagan.com, a Social Media site for people in the communications industry, but I read something last week about MySpace and Facebook being useful 'networking tools' for grown-ups. So I thought, what the heck.

Understand that I have been "networking" online since about 1984, when I ran the Chameleon BBS here in Houston and "networked" with friends from across the metropolitan area . I also "networked" with people around the country to develop new applications/code for the particular brand of BBS software we used on our Apple II computers. We all used 300-baud modems and dialup, when "online chat" was typing, without avatars, graphical smilies, video, audio or anything else. Many of us could type faster than our modems could send/receive the data for realtime chat, and for the BBSes, many of us could read messages as fast as the modems could retrieve data.

But it turns out I am old & have no clue about how these new networks "work." First, it appears (to an old fart like me) that 99% of the users on these things are under 30. Oddly, so was I back when I started online networking. But more importantly, none of them are people I know -- or maybe I just can't find the people I know. So I have no "friends," which is just (pout) pathetic.

In the real world, when you move to a new place, you join some groups of like-minded people and you "make friends." So I started that this weekend. Joined some "groups" to see what happens. I've heard/read stories about so-called "creepers" who "friend" anyone and everyone in an effort to appear popular. (And thus, the perfectly nice noun, friend, becomes a verb.) There is some debate about whether this is a horrible breach of etiquette or enthusiastic extraversion. Until I figure it out, I'm not "friending" anyone, even if I think I may know them. But I did "poke" someone I'm *sure* I know, but now I'm not sure that was wise -- but I don't know because I'm old & out of it. I feel a bit like my parents must have felt when I started online chats in the 1980s: "Why don't you just pick up the phone?"

Anyway, this is me on Facebook. If you're not on facebook, that link won't take you anywhere. If you are, but you're not a friend, I don't know what you will see: maybe everything, maybe nothing? (The dog refuses to log on & find out.) I also made a MySpace account but I'm not going to do anything with that right now.

So give me a .... poke? I don't really have any idea what I'm talking about here.

(Addendum: I also joined Twitter, which I really don't understand. It's like a global chat room... Very interesting...)

Neighborly update

The bad news: The rain destroyed Sunny's web, and she disappeared. The rain also did quite a number on the white spider's web. (I'm calling the white spider Luna.)

The good news: Luna rebuilt.

The bad news: It rained again.

The good news: Luna rebuilt again, and Sunny came back, but put her web in a different place (up in the trees, not quite as high as Luna's web, but also not across the sidewalk. And not as spectacular. I think Sunny is a bit depressed about the whole rebuilding thing.)

The even better news: There's a third one, another yellow face, in the backyard.

The worst news of all: I went to shoot a portrait of the new spider and felt a familiar, unpleasant tingle on my toes. It suggested the spider's new name: Queen Elizabeth. She is surrounded by palace guards, having built her throne directly over a fire ant mound. Ow ow ow ow ow.

Ain't nature great?

"Sunny" is back

Last one, I promise. A big thunder-boomer is about to smack the area. I'm afraid my new neighbors may lose their homes (cry).

Anyway, all this photography has been fun. It will be interesting (or sad) to see what the thunderstorm does to the webs. If the webs are destroyed, it will also be interesting (and fun) to see how long it takes for the spiders to rebuild (preferably not across the sidewalk...)

Lunch with the new neighbor

I went back out around noon to find Sunny missing from her web and the white spider happily welcoming some very unhappy critter to his (her?) web. I think it's a fly -- you can sort of see a wing in the green-background photo below. I came out while the white spider was busily preparing it for lunch. The web has a few good rips, but the spider doesn't seem to mind. I imagine it doing the equivalent of spider whistling while s/he works.




For what it's worth, the camera for all of these & most of the rest is a Panasonic DMC-FX07. Some of the shots in the other blog entries may have been taken with my Olympus C-50. The Olympus has a little more in the way of manual adjustments for f-stops, etc., but it's a bit older & has been dropped a few times, so it has "issues." I don't use the digital zoom on these cameras, so everything you see here is max 3x zoom.... so yes, I'm really close to the spiders.