Other Stuff

I've been out of the blogger loop lately.  Please accept my apologies for not commenting on your posts (though I may have read them), and for not responding to comments you've made on mine.  I truly enjoy and appreciate each and every comment, and am so very happy that you come by to check out my ramblings!  I assure you that I don't mean to be rude, and it doesn't mean I don't love you all.  It's just that, well, I've been busy doing ... other stuff.

The end of the school year gets especially hectic for those of us who are teachers, and to be honest, our brains are pretty well fried by now.  If you're a middle school teacher, you can double the mental crispiness, and if you're an 8th-grade teacher, you can double that again, and if you're an 8th-grade teacher of kids with learning and behavioral disorders, well, you get the picture.

Some other "other stuff" I've been doing includes...

... working in my flower gardens,

                                                           ... helping to build a new deck,

 and, of course, going out to our home-away-from-home in the country, which we did yesterday.

Still working on the log cabin...

 There's been a huge amount of rain in Lewis County, and the Kinneyconnick has surged far over its banks, haphazardly rearranging the surrounding landscape.
 

For instance, our little rock beach, which you can see on the right side of this photo, is now gone...

 ... having been replaced by a big pile of sticks.

Parts of the island have been scoured clean of vegetation...

... while massive mountains of flotsam and jetsam have been deposited here and there.  (What's the difference between flotsam and jetsam, anyway?)

Luckily, we left just in time to catch...

... the annual Lewis County Tractor Ride,

which is basically where everyone gets on their tractors,

and rides around Lewis County.  Who says there's no entertainment in the country?

All of this stuff  +s  up to  < time for artwork or blogging, but I hope to get going again soon.  Aren't you impressed with my awesome math skills?

Quite Peculiar

Well, I don't know if the computer gods just hate me or what. The virus my computer had before was apparently hiding somewhere and moving around and it came back with a vengence. I had to take it to professionals, who told me that 80% of their business was a result of this particular virus. They had to wipe the hard drive down to factory specs, then all the programs had to be reinstalled, etc., etc., etc. All this took about 2 weeks.

Then, what's even more bizarre, to add insult to injury, I could not get into my blogger account! When I tried to sign in, I got the message that my username is invalid. I got a gmail account recently, and this account is under my other email address. If I sign in using my gmail account, it says I have no blogs; if I try to sign in using my other one, it's invalid. Somehow I was able to get in using a different search engine, but have no idea if this will work in the future. This very well may be my last post! If anyone has ever had this problem, PLEASE let me know what to do.

The photo included in this post was taken by my son, Colin Reusch (it's his own eyeball), and digitally manipulated by me.
Anyway, as John Lennon would say, "Quite peculiar, mama!"

Cyberspace Name Change

I finally decided to give my blog a new name. About a year ago, when I was so sadly ignorant of all things bloggish, my son was setting up this blog for me. "What do you want to call it?" he asked. In my typical, quick-witted fashion, I replied, "Huh?" He shook his head and typed in 'Look at this thing I made today', and since I could think of nothing better at the time, it stuck. At the time I thought it would be a daily painting blog; I tried this for a while but it about killed me, since I have a day job which tends to suck all the life out me.
So today I came up with a name which is more apropos of the true nature of this blog. I guess I had to actually do it for a while before I could see exactly what it would be, if you know what I mean. What it seems to be is some sort of visual diary, where I rattle on to whoever's out there in cyberspace. 'Cyberspace' used to seem like a sort of goofy, overblown term until I started doing this, but now its meaning makes perfect sense. I feel like I'm releasing words and images into a sort of vast empty void where they float around until possibly, by some random chance, someone looks at them. It's like, "hey, is anybody out there?"