November 30, 2003
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
7:18 PM (Pacific)
"The eyes believe themselves; the ears believe other people."
Remind me to put that in the Wit & Wisdom Blog.
I'd forgotton how beautiful this room is.
It's a cycle...my room is the smallest room in the house. I picked it because of that fact. Somehow I thought it would keep it from ending up as the storage room...yet it always ends up that way anyway. Until I get sick of it and throw all the stuff out.
To be fair, I don't like stuff. To me, everything should have a purpose, a meaning.
In that regard I'm not overly picky. My computer is several years old. The front label still brags about being Y2K compliant. So what? It works. I can do this entire website on it.
I need some more batteries. I use rechargeables. Expensive, but then. You have to figure in the cost of the hassle of constantly buying new batteries. To me it's worth it to buy a charger and buy rechargeable batteries.
A quiet day...cleaning up my room, putting my kids' art in plastic sleeves inside a binder.
November 28, 2003
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
2:08 PM (Pacific)
All I wanna do is thank you
Even though I don't know who you are...
It's been a quiet, uneventful day, the kind you have to be my age to appreciate.
When you're young, you feel that boredom can potentially kill you. You sit in your room, thinking about other people's exciting, glamorous lives...what it would be like to be Brooke Shields or Jodie Foster, Flannery O'Connor or Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath (okay before she did herself in) or Erica Jong, Gladys Knight or Lindsey Wagner. (Some figures from my youth.)
Now...mind you I'm furiously knocking, nay, pounding wood as I write this...you're glad when nothing, absolutely nothing, happens. When the sewer doesn't back up. When the kids are not sick. When the car starts.
The best thing to put into strong coffee is brown sugar. It's really delicious.
Great! We are finally recovering some of the traffic we lost when our broadroom.net domain was down. Yesterday we got 559 unique visits. We had half that when the domain was down, then I felt that we'd been kicked off of people's bookmarks, since the majority of referrers now are from search engines rather than other pages on the site.
I do check the site statistics just about every day.
The thing is, I have no idea who's reading our site. I've thought about putting a poll up, but I myself hate filling out surveys. I'm always suspicious as to where the information is going.
Who reads this blog? Do you read it regularly, or did you accidentally pull it up in Google and read it once?
What on earth do you people buy online????? Do you visit this site often enough to buy it through us? We pay our own operating costs; all of the ads on the site are ours, not our host's. Is there some online company you buy from that we don't have?
Do you blog yourself and would you like a link to your blog on the Women Bloggers list? (erm, women only, sorry.)
Do you have your own site and would you like to do a link exchange? (Sites run by women or catering to women's interests, and I warn ye, we are picky.)
Do you write? We can't pay guest writers as of yet, but people do visit this site. You'd keep ownership of your work, you'd get a byline and a link to your own site. Our main restrictions re content are the same as for the rest of the site: we are not overtly political and we don't etail anything directly off the site.
Super!! You are WILLEM DE KOONING.
You think just like you paint: in the abstract. You live well outside of the box and never know where life will take you next. Your friends admire your ability to fearlessly veer away from the boundaries of society.
November 17, 2003
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
2:25 PM (Pacific)
I don't mean that flippantly. I am neither for nor against Schwarzenegger. The last guy running for office that I had any interest in, was Ralph Nader.
But what the hell. Can an actor and businessman, really be worse than a career politician?
Weather: sun after rain. Not dramatic sun after rain. In the summer, the sun literally burns the moisture off the ground. Clouds of steam puff up; when I first saw them, I thought there was a fire.
Drink: second cup of latte. I mean latte rather loosely, since we make it at home rather than buying it from a shop.
Wearing: green lambswool sweater, Express Bleus bootcut jeans, Doc Martens. I haven't bothered putting any makeup on.
Hum. I just got a haircut, about two inches off. I can't grow my hair really long, it just gets stringy.
Daughter: cranky.
Today's deep observation: spiders are overrated, in terms of their insect eating. I mean we have tons of spiders. The same spider, it seems to me, can hang around in a corner for months without eating.
On the other hand, their engineering goes beyond brilliance. I am always impressed by a well-constructed spider web, I could look at it for hours.
The Halloween candy is just about finished. Isn't that terrible? I ate some of it myself. The rest of the year, I do not eat candy, aside from chocolate.
Been doing odd miscellaneous research--like finding a replacement part for a pressure washer. Figuring out if you need a visa to go to Jamaica (apparently you don't, if you're a U.S. citizen arriving directly from the U.S.). What else. Calling my HMO. They get weirder each time you call them.
Next, I will have to call the espresso machine manufacturer and figure out if they sell gaskets online.
Saw Michael Moore on C-Span last night. Found out he was Catholic. Figures.
lol Okay I like Michael Moore. I don't agree with all of his politics. I just like the idea of some guy speaking his mind. It's hard to find. I can't say I knew he was Catholic, but now that I know, it makes sense?
It's green out in the back yard. California, typically, has brown hills. We had next to no rain for years, only a bit...directly after the bit, the hills would turn green. You'd stare at them since they wouldn't stay that way for long. Now it's as if, we've had enough rain the past few years to make up for ten years of not having it.
Oh yeah, Arnold Schwarzenegger got sworn in today.
It's amazing really, the older you get...you suddenly realize the preciousness of certain things.
I was listening this morning to Alistair Cooke's "Letter from America." Actually I missed most of it, I just caught the tail end. Now I'm cursing myself. How many more "Letter From America"'s are there going to be? When it's gone, who will replace it?
No one...no one at all. The perspective is unique.
Mind you I am not one of those people who thinks her own generation will never be replaced by another generation; not at all. Yesterday's World War I veterans, became today's World War II veterans. Yesterday's women who got paid less than men, are today's women who are paid less than men. The sun, as far as I can tell, still rises in the East and sets in the West.
What I mean is this. It takes a long time to grow an intellectual. A young intellectual is not nearly as valuable as an old one.
You can replace an old intellectual with a young one but then you can replace a mature tree with a sapling. It is not the same thing.
Speaking of which. I'm almost scared. If I were any younger, I would in fact be frightened.
Every time I turn on the tv, I see some woman who looks dramatically younger than she did ten years ago. I won't name names; there's hardly a point. It's everywhere.
It's a bit like the men who have more hair now than they did in the 1970's (again not mentioning names). Or, the men who suddenly stopped getting grey hair (this started a year or two ago).
But, for some reason, to me it's slightly scarier. Maybe because this form of youth involves either cutting into your face, or injecting botulism into it.
Is it so wrong to grow old? It's just eerie. Can one live so long and learn nothing? have no scars to show for it? have no map to one's personality, one's morality, imprinted upon one's face?
Is it a permanent change for us? Or is it more along the lines of breast implants?
When I was growing up...age 15, say...breast implants were all the rage (presumably before they started rupturing, leaking, or otherwise creeping you out). I felt the artificial was the norm. For years I gave serious consideration to getting them.
Now did our economy collapse as a result of my not getting them--that I doubt. Did my view of my own body change as a result of my not getting them--hmmm. I guess I realized that no one expected men to get implants of any sort. Since men get paid more, and higher salary indicates higher value in any society, I concluded that not getting implants was a good thing. i.e. why not emulate the rich instead of the poor?
I would say implanted breasts became devalued when you kept seeing them and everyone and her dog on tv and cinema had them. The shock value was gone. Back to the individual, the imperfect, the...dare I say it...soft.
But, I stress, I am not young. I have already lived through at least one trend that I never thought would abate.
Another deserves mention here. I don't think I knew any girl back in the '70's who did not have an eating disorder of some kind. Again, the artificial was the norm. It is nothing the way it is now. People complain that there is an unnaturally thin ideal now but it's nothing compared to the way it was back then.
Did I ever think it would change? No I did not. That is the weakness of youth and inexperience.
November 14, 2003
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
3:07 PM (Pacific)
Okey dokey, here is Kristin's article: Room to Live.
We now have a (fledgling) articles index too: Articles Index.
November 13, 2003
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
6:02 PM (Pacific)
I am more than pleased to announce our new site member, Kristin!
yay!!!! yahoo!!!!!
Kristin hails from sunny Scotland :) and has many and varied interests, including renovating. When I have her official okey dokey to announce her slice-of-life article on the renovation process, you'll see that link here.
November 6, 2003
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
3:25 PM (Pacific)
Washington weather!
By that I mean Washington State. (I do realize that Washington usually means D.C.)
The funny thing is that you do get used to it. I don't mean as a generalization; you get used to it as long as you have a good job in Washington. If you're SOL in Washington, it's quite possibly the most miserable place to be SOL in the lower 48 (I've heard Alaska is worse).
Today is sort of grey, drizzly, a bit chill. Washington would be about ten times DARKER, WETTER and COLDER. Still, for California, it's crappy weather.
What I do is a.) listen to some good music. It's not a coincidence that Nirvana arose from Washington, not at all.
2.) eat hot soup. I buy Progresso when it goes on sale. In fact remind me, I have to get out and get some more. I heat it up on the stove and eat the whole thing while it's still slightly burning hot.
3.) hmmm...when I was in Washington, I used to drink coffee all day. By coffee I mean espresso. It doesn't affect you in that weather. Again, it's not a coincidence that strong coffee drinking came out of Washington.
On a side note, I always preferred Tully's and Seattle's Best Coffee to Starbucks. :) Better price and better coffee.
I still have mixed feelings about Washington. I lived there, I think a total of three years although it wasn't continuous.
There is a side to that place that is wildly funny and entertaining. I mean it is so overall gloomy and Republican and "if ah divorce mah wife, will she still be my sister?" and yes, your walls get moldy...and if you walk on the sidewalk, people are so stupid they drive by and splash water out of the gutter on you. I mean how stupid can you get????? It rains six months out of the year, don't tell me you never noticed that water gets into the gutters. People do not know how to drive in Washington State.
On the other hand there are so many cheap ways to entertain yourself. Life, in many ways, is affordable. Housing is cheap. Food is cheap. People can be very okay over there. It still has a Wild West sheen...for better or for worse.
Heh heh...to tell you the truth, he's not even my favorite actor although I think he has great potential. My favorite actor is Johnny Depp. And...Robert Downey Jr. I know he's a junkie...the funny part is that whenever he does get his crap together, he's brilliant.
November 3, 2003
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
6:15 PM (Pacific)
Adventures in cleaning a stainless steel hood
I'll move this over to the Household Hints section as soon as I figure out if I've ruined the dang thing or not. Actually logic dictates that I haven't, I just like to wait and see.
We have one of these with a top that angles down and out. Unfortunately, that part tends to accumulate dust and little particles of grease.
I tried cleaning it as usual with this spray stainless steel cleaner I got at Home Depot, which usually works. This time it didn't work on the particles of grease.
I tried putting a thin layer of the cleaner on and leaving it overnight. The grease particles remained...
Finally I got sick of it and did this: took some liquid dish detergent (Joy Ultra), put it on a dry paper towel, and buffed the grease with it. You need a glob of dish detergent at a time, it works only on a small area. Keep putting little globs of dish detergent on and buffing. The grease came off.
I finished by buffing off the dish detergent with a clean dry paper towel, then doing the usual spray stainless steel cleaner as a finishing touch.
Brigid, the great mother goddess of Ireland, represents fertility, childbirth, power, creativity and inspiration. Also known as Brighid, Brigit and Bride, she is credited as a protectress and guardian of children; also a Goddess of fire, the sun, music and medicine.
Okay folks I believe we have straightened out our domain woes. broadroom.net should be back in commission within the next few days which would include our mail server.
The weather has finally changed. Time to break out the sweaters, jackets, coats, scarves and hats. Well to me it's freezing anyway.
I am not a morning person. (That's what I was thinking this morning.) But I am trying to change. Most successful people, I think, are in fact morning people.
One of the keys is to develop a personal style that works in the morning. lol I'm serious really. I like to wash my hair in the morning, but I loathe to blow it dry. And right now I need a haircut. It's a couple of inches past shoulder-length.
In short I do leave the house with wet, long hair.
My summer solution was to use a "toothy" hairband. This is a regular hairband but with long teeth so it doesn't slide around.
Now that winter is here :) I've gone into hat mode. More specifically, you can wear a wool beret over perfectly wet, long hair and it functions to keep your head warm, your hair back off your face, and it even adds some instant panache. And, you don't get "hat hair." When you take the beret off, just shake your hair out and it's nice and fluffy again.
On a cosmetic note, I can rely on my eyepencils...my L'Oreal Le Grand Kohl in "Raisin." I'm starting to like this even better than my Revlon PowderLiner in "Brown Suede." It's a little more special, for a start. It's purple but it's subtle. Looks great on its own.
I say that because if you're doing the beret thing, it's well to wear some makeup with it. Unless you look like Halle Berry. :) Doing the eyepencil alone takes less than a minute.
November 1, 2003
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
2:08 PM (Pacific)
Okay we have a tad of technical difficulties.
Message from yahoo.com.
Unable to deliver message to the following address(es).
<webmaster@broadroom.net>:
Sorry, I couldn't find any host named broadroom.net. (#5.1.2)
Until Monday, it is very likely our broadroom.net domain will be down, which includes all of our site email accounts.
Oddly enough thebroadroom.net seems to be working, so the site itself will be up, which includes our FTP. Yes!
People trying to contact anyone at a broadroom.net account should use something else until Monday or Tuesday. In a pinch, try our thebroadroom[at]yahoo[dot]com email.
Hmmm...I'll have to think about doing NaNoWriMo. I love the idea but I'm not sure how it's going to fit with doing the site.
What in the world is going on here?????????? I've sent out emails from our yahoo email account...since our domain email account does not work with yahoo mail. Now I'm not even sure our yahoo account works with yahoo mail.
On top of this, we're having a glitch with our domain email account. It'll be fixed on Monday but until then I can't guarantee mail sent to or from any broadroom.net email account.
If anyone's trying to reach me, please leave a comment? At least enetation seems to be working.
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