Since I was compelled to create a new category today called Squirrel Queen Tales, I am equally compelled to add the now-infamous Goosepond Swamp Monster legend to it, and link to the photo of where said Goosepond Monster lives.

Notice there’s no talk of Goosepondery over here.  But I’m still putting my money on ‘Coma.  If anyone can find the GSM, she can.

(Technically I guess the category should be ‘Coma tales, but seeing as how the category was begat of Squirrelly’s now-confirmed ice cream headache remedy that I impudently laughed at when I first heard it, plus Squirrel Queen Tales just sounds funnier…)

One of these days, I’m no longer going to have a host of old posts moved over from the old site that need to be edited and categorized. There’s still 274 of them, mostly from 1997 to 2000. I usually catch the old ones as they come up as hits in my blog stats and fix them then, but god, I can hardly stand to read that old stuff, especially, say, pre-2000 or thereabouts. Partially because there are so many posts about friends of mine who have been dead a pretty long time now, though one of these days I guess I will be glad I documented so much of those years.

But mainly I can’t stand to read them because those old posts just make me wince. For someone who was already (ok, barely) in her thirties when I started blogging in 1997, I find I was rather ridiculous and giggly and I just see some of that stuff and go “ewww”. Or “ugh”.

That’s a goal before I die, though, get all that old crap categorized and edited - edited meaning separated into logical paragraphs. I got lazy and more tired the more mammoth that chore of moving them became and just at some point quit trying to make it all pretty and moved them all in bulk and in big chunks. I mean, I was copying and pasting years and years’ worth of HTML entries. HTML. It was a pain.

And another goal is to get Sarcastro’s old photos re-uploaded to his now-not-that-new blog, still. (Says the Queen of Procrastination…)

Those are reasonable and reachable goals I think, probably unlike the other 5 million goals and projects on the list. I wish there were three or four or even five or six of me and maybe I could get some things FINISHED for a change.

Well, my proposal about starting a music-only blog has already presented a quandary. The most obvious couple choices I would have immediately gone for name-wise are taken. I have one more possibility (that I don’t like as well).

So I’ll take it to y’all. If Lynnster of The Lynnster Zone had a music-only blog too, what’s the first thing or things that come to mind you figure it would be called?

I am debating lately on whether to start a separate music blog, seeing as how based on my stats (and hearsay) I figure about half my regular/somewhat regular readers have no to little interest in the music stuff, while the other half or so come for the music stuff and don’t care much about the rest.  And, I know I can get a little obsessive about the music stuff at times.  So, I’m debating.  Move the already done music stuff over there and then whenever I get the urge, that’s where it’ll all be.

Of course, I say that also knowing there are a handful of other unfinished projects that have been cooking since last fall or earlier, but anyway, I’m pondering.  Ponder, ponder.

There’s just really no time to be spared, so pardon me for this hit & run update.

1. A little while ago, I ate a cheese Krystal - because I was badly in need of food that I could get quick and didn’t have to cook and it was 3 in the morning - and it was unbelievably, horribly, terribly, awfully & ungodly bad. I have never had a Krystal that tasted that disgustingly, putridly bad in my life. Yes, I realize that Krystals are not haute cuisine, but come on - it’s a Krystal. How can you screw up a Krystal that bad?? If I die in my sleep here in a little bit, you’ll know what happened. Blech. A shoe sole would have tasted better I think.

2. I’ve been eating entirely too much fast food lately anyway, which is kind of okay because I never eat anyway and all I ever get is, like, one little McDonald’s cheeseburger, and they’re all of a dollar and I DO NOT HAVE TIME to cook. But let’s not talk about the fact that in the past two weeks I’ve been served (A) a cheeseburger that was between two top buns, and (B) got home one day and opened the bag to discover I had a top & bottom bun with cheese in the middle - and no burger. Wake up, people! I know it’s just an unimportant $1.00 cheeseburger, but it might just be someone’s only meal of the day that you totally screw up.

3. I know I shouldn’t have laughed because they’re both elderly and one’s a little sickly and might be a bit senile, but watching not just one but two of my cats fall off the desk a few minutes ago, within a few minutes of each other, with an empty chip bag (the small 99-cent Big Grab size) on their heads was almost as funny as a few years ago when my elderly then-16-year old cat got his head stuck inside an empty Krystal Chik box.

4. On a not-as-amusing note, Maggie’s (same Maggie as in the pic above) new favorite place to nap is with her head on the edge of my keyboard, which usually eventually occurs to me at some point after being puzzled as to why I’m typing in all caps or ““““` is appearing on the screen again.

5. I am apparently now completely and totally assimilated into the electronic communications world at this point, because now that my fax AND my printer are both borked, and a fax that I needed to get where it needed to go so I could start getting some commission payments didn’t go through because that dinosaur of a mid-’90s era fax that I inherited from my old office is totally dead now… it took about a month for it to finally occur to me that I could just put a stamp on an envelope and MAIL it.

6. Besides the petered out fax and printer, now my desktop is apparently on its last legs too - I’ve known it was coming, was hoping to hold it off a little longer, seeing as how that’s pretty distressing since I do 100% of my work on this computer these days - but it spit out a frightening serious error at me the other day and threatened to not start (but it eventually did). In the course of seeing what I could afford to ditch in an effort to get it speeded up a little and prepare to defragment the drive for the first time in I dunno how long, after going through some other directories, I took note of the millions of Notepad files I’ve got saved to the desktop - and had a bit of a chuckle over the title of some of those files, such as: CLC Links Widget, WP Tutorial, Moved Blogs, kathyt, kathyt Links Widget, More Moved Blogs, B Blogger Template, one simply titled B, B Tutorial (yes, I don’t remember why I felt I needed to make her her own instead of giving her the one I gave everyone else), and Sarcastro Stuff (which reminds me yet again that I STILL need to repost all his old photos one of these days, ugh). Anyway, giggle - yeah, I’m a blog geek.

7. There are angels in the blogosphere and in my MySpacesphere too. Angels, I tell you.

8. I’m so tired I don’t have time to BREATHE, and I don’t have time anyway because I have way too much work and projects to do. This staying up for a day and a half at a time, sleeping a few hours and starting all over again is getting a little old. I’ve been up again for about 38 or 39 hours now and worked straight through for about 22 well, really about 29 or 30, of those, so yeah - ’scuse me if I’m a little loopy right now.

That is all. But seriously, if I don’t at least show up for a minute on Twitter by tonight? Food poisoning. Ugh, a nasty, dirty, filthy shoe sole would have no doubt tasted better. Yuck.

9. (Yes, Lesley and Brittney, I know I shouldn’t eat meat anyway.)

10. (But still - it’s a Krystal! How can anyone screw up a Krystal??)

11. Zzzzzz…

I figure I’m extremely overdue for my biannual post griping about this issue, probably because I have been so behind in catching up with most of the blogs I try to read regularly, I haven’t been using my feed reader much and have been mostly spot-checking off my blogroll here, daily or weekly or so catching up with the blogs I just won’t miss.

But now, after finally having gotten my feed reader un-backed up and at a manageable level of posts to deal with again, I’m ready to bitch about it again. I’ve been threatening to do this for probably a year and a half now, but this time I’m serious.

If you are one of those bloggers that only publishes a “preview” feed of your posts and doesn’t publish your full feed, I’m deleting you from my feed reader. I don’t care if you’re my best friend or my mother, you’re getting axed sometime within the next couple of weeks or so.

Fortunately most of the blogfolks I know well and read regularly don’t have this annoying habit (and neither my best friend nor my mom really blog), so there’s really not that many on the soon-to-be-deleted list. Unfortunately there’s a few bloggers I’ve been reading for years (who likely don’t read my blog anyway so, I know, what’s the point, right?) that ARE on that short list, but I’m so sick of it I don’t care anymore. There are some regional bloggers on that short list too, though - not many, but a few.

When it comes to dealing with other blogs, there’s nothing that drives me more insane than trying to efficiently catch up with (and stay on top of) my regular blogreading than coming back across those feeds that only publish a preview and you have to go to the blog site itself to actually read the post, so I’m just not dealing with it anymore.

The more time that’s gotten consumed dealing with the blogosphere in general, the more I’ve tried to get my reading and participation down to a manageable level where it’s not going to take me fifty billion hours every day to stay caught up and top of things, so if I have to delete blogs that I normally read every single day or almost and have for years because they refuse to publish their feed in full, so be it.

The way I look at it, if I’ve taken the time and made the effort to subscribe to your feed because I’m interested in what you write, I should be able to do so with my feed reader if I want, instead of you throwing a bone instead of your full feed and making me have to take a bunch of extra steps to actually get to read all of what you wrote beyond a few sentences.

I suppose the factor of being able to see there’s been an update is a pro of subscribing, but honestly there’s just not much point to me in subscribing to your feed if I have to go to your blog anyway to actually get to READ your posts, so from now on, I just won’t. My time is taken up enough by blog reading to have to be dealing with extra steps in the process.

If your reasons for insisting people come directly to your blog to read are because of advertising and you run Google ads, Feedburner has a Google AdSense option that can be included in your feed. Use it. Hell, I’ll be happy to click on ads from time to time in a feed if you’d just publish your full damn feed.

If your reasons for insisting people come directly to your blog to read are because you are overly attached to your SiteMeter or other stat counter and like to suss out the mysteries of who is reading your blog on the off chance that seeing a particular city in your details means so-and-so’s been reading your blog… then you need a new hobby.

I really do mean no offense, but I’m just sick of it. There was a backlog of something like 65,000 posts in my feed reader - which gives you a good idea of how long I’d been ignoring it - and every time I clicked on one of those blogs that doesn’t publish posts in their entirety, my blood pressure shot up just a little bit more. I almost deleted them all right then, but figured I’d wait a week or two just on the off chance that some might run across this and realize hey, maybe not publishing my full feed is a bad idea after all.

I won’t be deleting any of them that are on there from my blogroll, but since I’ve gotten my feed reader caught up again, I likely won’t be tagging the blogroll much for my own personal reading purposes, so.

So there it is. With the exception of Sarcastro’s kid blog (which I suspect may be an oversight anyway), if you don’t publish your full feed, your days are numbered in my feed reader. Like anyone cares, I know, but it makes me feel better to have vented about it anyway. Grrrr.

On a semi-related note to new news, I guess I’m going to have to quit badmouthing that thing that rhymes with Clogger after all.  I discovered it really HAS improved a great deal since most of us made the mass exodus to WordPress a couple of years ago.

Still could use some tweaking (and damned if they don’t have the SAME templates and NO new ones), but the system itself is really a whole lot better.

I’m not impressed enough to go back, and I still like WordPress much, much better.  But it really has improved, I’ll give it that much.

I got inexplicably locked out of my MyBlogLog account over a year ago because the password reset function wasn’t working - this was before Yahoo swooped it up - so when I went back and Yahoo now had taken over and everything had changed, I could find virtually no way to get back into my old account and community. A little help from Support (impressively fast and just raised my previous opinions about Yahoo support quite a bit) and I was back in.

So wow, they’ve really kind of improved a lot and added some great stuff over there, huh? And now with Twitter, LastFM, MySpace, Flickr, Technorati, YouTube, StumbleUpon and tons of other services feeding into it if you so desire. It’s like I can never totally get lost and disappear from the Internet ever again! Tee hee.

I really should start being a little more active over there. I noticed, even through all this time I was locked out of the account, that I get visitors through it regularly so I think it’s well worth the time to be a little active, if you’re into that kind of thing. I’m really not for the Zone, but indirectly the Zone gives exposure to projects I DO care about numbers of visitors and stuff - like all my music projects - so activities in other online communities is a good thing in that case.

Anyway, well, kudos to MyBlogLog for all the improvements and additions. I still wish the interface was a little easier to deal with as far as searching for and joining communities and especially adding contacts - I’m clueless as to whether I’m in any of my contacts’ communities and whether communities I’ve joined belonging to my friends, if I’m on their contact list, and it’s really just too much trouble to sort out the way it is right now. But still things over there are vastly improved from the last time I was able to access that account, so thumbs up on the improvements.

Oh, and one of the improvements was the addition of a non-Java reader widget for WordPress.com, so finally I got that back after not having had it for years, and you can join The Lynnster Zone’s community over there too if you so desire (see right sidebar). Woot, and stuff.

Hoo boy, yeah, we’re really getting up to date and into this century here now, you bet. How, you say? Why, take a look down that left sidebar. No, further down. Yeah, there.

You can now subscribe to The Lynnster Zone via e-mail. (Or you can use this handy dandy link in the previous sentence.) Are you excited now? Yes, I’m being sarcastic.  So now, for those of you who don’t want to, nor know how to, nor care to learn how to subscribe by feed, you can have me delivered straight to your e-mail box.  Aces.

No, really, I was updating some stuff at FeedBurner (like those poor little subscription chicklets down in the left sidebar that half of them were pitifully old) & while there I just happened to wander in the “E-mail Subscriptions” section and looked around and went, huh, wonder why I never bothered to set that up before. No, I don’t know either.

There’s something else new too, down there in the right sidebar. No, further down. More. Yeah, right there.

Yes, even though I have had my OLD music pages that haven’t been touched in at least two or three years in a little link group down there, for whatever moronic reason I had never bothered to do the same with my CURRENT pages I manage nowadays practically every day. So, probably not too exciting unless you’re a diehard music fan and/or Aussie music fan - or if you’re just interested in seeing what ELSE I spend my voluminous amounts of free time on (*cough*) besides this blog (*choke*) - but well, now they’re there.

I probably did something else new here tonight but whatever it was, I’m sure it wasn’t terribly important.

I am a busy little bee this week doing some real work plus another project plus determined to get some to-do’s off my list that have been sitting there waiting to be done forEVER - things that if I will just get them DONE they will be super low maintenance from there on out - so back to the salt mines I go. Ciao.

Very much sad about this.

His was literally one of the first Nashville & Tennessee regional blogs I started reading regularly, lo, all those ages ago.  I’m sure there’s good reasons but I’m gonna miss his special brand of humor & views on life in general, cute stories about being a good dad, and absolutely perfect sarcastic wit anyhow.

Don’t you dare disappear on us altogether, & happy trails, pal.

So after I bitched about not being able to keep up with Twitter properly, Neil (brilliantly, I might add) pointed out he thought I could subscribe to a feed where I wouldn’t miss anything, especially direct responses to me, which was an awesome suggestion.

So I was thinking about that and thinking hey, maybe I’ll get a little more efficient now, and set about to seeing about that.

And then when I went back to Twitter a little while later,  I noticed this curious little tab at the top of my Twitter page that said: “Replies”.

If I were any blonder, I think my head would probably explode.

I am probably the world’s worst kind of Tweeter (Twitterer? Tweeterer? Uh… dunno, but I think I like Twitterer best).

I’m like a hit-and-run Twitterer most of the time. I’ll post about something (usually nothing at all important whatsoever), and then I’ll forget to go back for two or three days… by which time whatever responses there may have been to my unimportant babble are so far back they’re inaccessible and whatever conversations were going on at the moment have moved on and changed to something else. When I do go back, I end up catching up on entire days at a time (but of course, not the last one I posted a Tweet on, ‘cos it’s already long gone).

I wish there was some way you could go back further in the archives. You know, just in case someone did post a response to my totally unimportant babble. Even if no one did, I get a little frustrated with it all just from missing so much.

It’s not that I’m ignoring anyone on purpose, I just forget or get too tied up in other stuff and forget to go back until it’s way too late. I should really do better though. I remember when we all first got into the whole Twitter thing I used to scan it several times a day. Just a little more effort and I wouldn’t get as behind as I usually do, but it’s just one more thing to keep up with and I already got so many other things to keep up with, a number of which I toss to the back burner just as badly. Ugh, I dunno, I would just like to be able to pay better attention most of the time.

I guess if one of your biggest problems is not being able to keep up with your online social network conversation in progress, there’s lots worse things in life and you shouldn’t complain too much.

Oops, I forgot to blog this week, huh?  Wow, sorry.  This week has just been crazy busy.

So even though it has not moved from my driveway since Wednesday, sometime within the last 48 hours the windshield of my not-even-a-year-old-yet car developed a crack.  It’s at the bottom of the windshield (well, mostly) and not all THAT bad, I suppose, but come on, this is a practically new car that doesn’t even have 10K miles on it yet - and it hasn’t been out of my driveway since Wednesday!  I know we had a bad storm last night, but I discerned no hail, and I don’t see any evidence around of why this would have happened, so yeah, I’m not happy right now.  Happy Birthday to me.

Yeah, I don’t usually make a fuss about or even remotely announce such things, but since LiveJournal already ratted me out to Smiley and I guess everyone else on my LJ list, I figured I would go ahead and acknowledge it so I could gripe some more.  Right now I’m enjoying my last seven-ish hours of being able to say I’m 41.  Because 42 just sounds… older.

(Apologies to ‘Coma who is a little flipped out about 42 right now… hee.)

(PS When someone posted on Twitter last week about Gilligan’s Island’s Mary Ann, Dawn Wells, getting busted for weed, I really thought it was a joke and didn’t pay any more attention to it.  Well, I’ll be.)

(PPS Technically I won’t be 42 until 2:24 a.m. so really that’s nine-ish hours of being able to say I’m 41.  Hey look, I’ll take what I can get, even if it’s only two more hours of being younger.)

This is probably just asking for trouble, I know. But I am a little puzzled as to why in the last, oh, two or three weeks, the amount of spam comments and trackbacks sitting in my Akismet basket here on WordPress has gone from an average of 100 or more a day to, like, two in a week.

Those of us who have our own domains attached to our WP blogs have always attracted lots more spam than those who don’t, as a general rule, and it wasn’t unheard of for me to glance in there after not looking for a week or so and see 300-500 of the pesky little suckers in there.

Only having two… and I have no idea when the last time I looked was - a week? Two? In any case, only having two… that’s kinda drastic. Not that I’m complaining, but I wonder what changed?

Have any of you other WordPress.com bloggers noticed the same thing? Especially those of you who have your own domains attached?

I hadn’t been by one of my fave blogs in a while, Abbie the Cat Has a Posse, so when I stopped by tonight I was distressed to learn that Abbie had been missing for a while (for real) earlier this month.  Upon further reading, I was relieved to discover that he had been found, thank goodness.   Not really surprised he turned up - a 20-lb. tuxedo cat wouldn’t get overlooked very easily, I don’t think - but certainly glad he did, after what was apparently a pretty large effort by many folks to help find him, and his owner, known as The Guy, is understandably relieved.  Hopefully Abbie will get back to blogging and report on all his adventures away from home soon.

And, if by chance you missed the Oscars tonight, The Squirrel Queen live blogged the whole thing, so drop by and catch up if you have a mind to.  Apparently red was the in color this year, and you know, I’m sorry, but Cameron Diaz just sucks anyway.

I wanted to comment today on this post over at Knuck’s because he has a really cool little kid having a birthday today, and the post is a really touching father-to-daughter post even with that special Knuck brand o’ sarcasm (heh), and I just liked it. Having also been an only child and daughter (in this scenario my sister doesn’t count), I dug it (and got just a little bit teary reading it, but don’t tell anybody).

But alas, I have given up all hope of being able to comment on Blogger blogs anymore after months and months of trying and even having consulted with a Blogger/Blogspot expert of sorts, who also eventually gave up trying to figure out why I can no longer comment on blogs on the Blogger platform. When someone who actually was a part of building the damn Blogger platform in the first place can’t even figure it out, I’m sure not going to keep wasting my time trying to.

I love all my Blogger blogging friends, they probably think I don’t care anymore nor read but I do, and I miss being able to comment over at their respective cribs. It figures, and is just my luck, that the majority I would like to comment often on are using Blogger’s regular comment system and not HaloScan or something. Most of these folks I have tried a time or two to get them to convert to WordPress (or ANYTHING besides Blogger) and my powers of persuasion have failed miserably. Or simply, as with some, they just never have had the problems those of us who fled Blogger lo now so many moons