Blog Stats

It’s been over a year since I started this thing, so I’m totally qualified now to inform you about the world as viewed from the perspective of a seasoned blog veteran.

No, just kidding.  I just wanted to tell you some things I’ve learned from obsessively checking my blog stats this past year.

Things I Have Learned From Blog Stats

1. Firefox is a very popular web browser.  So is Chrome.  Explorer, not so much (but who’s surprised by that?).  Safari’s lagging even behind IE.

2. There’s a browser called Iceweasel.

3. I have kind of a big following in Malaysia.

4. Number three may have something to do with the fact that for some reason I keep getting a lot of traffic from a teeth whitening webpage.

5. I hope number four is because I have nice white teeth.  I really can’t tell what the hell that site’s spamming.

6. I’m *this close* to breaking 6,000 page views.  This doesn’t include my own views of my blog.  It does include the teeth whitening views of my blog.

7. There are a LOT of people getting misdirected to this blog by running Google searches about muscles.  My muscle post has 395 total page views – more than three times the page views of my next-most popular post about the hippocampus, and more than ten times that of an average post.

8. Number seven happened because I stole a really useful image from someone else.

9. Outside of muscle terms, neuron terms, and my blog name, “love like woe zombie” is the only Google search term that made it into the all-time top ten search keywords used to access this blog. (Apparently someone used this term eight whole times to link here.)

10. In the past month, these search keywords led people to this blog a total of 35 times (gosh, I’m sorry!): “hippocampal relay”, “neuron”, “sex chromosomes”, “how to make sarcomere structure model”, “26’ uhaul truck total length” (P.S. I can totally answer that one for you – it’s 26 feet), “let them eat kait” (oh my God someone actually typed this into a search engine!  Maybe!), “sarcomere model on paper”, “3x3 inch wall tiles photos”, “axon synapse”, and “bathroom tiles”.  As far as I can tell only three of these 35 clicks were meant for me.

11. I have earned exactly zero dollars from my lack of advertisements. You’re welcome.

These all seem really self-denigrating, so I wanted to send a shout-out to the guy who sent me an e-mail saying he’d found my blog by searching for something like “zombie apocalypse survival” and stumbling onto this post.  Man, you made my freaking year.  Thank you for letting me believe that some of these accidental clicks are luring in people who actually read some of the rest of what I put here.  I hope your novel-writing is going swimmingly!

Thank you all for reading this blog.  I am in awe of all of you and am deeply humbled by your support.

P.S. – Guys, seriously, if you ever see me making a typo please let me know.  I found like three today and it was depressing.

DO NOT PEE ON THE TOILET SEAT

Okay, ladies.  I’ve tried to be nice but enough is enough.  It’s time for you to be told.  DO NOT PEE ON PUBLIC TOILET SEATS.

You would think this would be like saying “Do not jump parachute-less out of a plane” or “Do not pit chimpanzees against badgers in a cage fight”.  It should be a ridiculous mandate because the eventuality against which you are striving is unrealistic, deeply irresponsible or even impossible to realize.

Ladies, I should not have to inspect a public toilet seat for your urine every damn time I sit down on it.  The toilet seat surrounds a big, wide hole full of water.  That hole (it’s called a toilet bowl), that’s what you should be aiming for – not the seat.  You put your legs on the seat.  Your entire private area should rest comfortably in the big wide open space into which the pee is supposed to directed.  Your water, ideally, should all end up pleasantly comingling with the toilet water.  It was designed that way!

I know why you’re scared to sit on that seat.  I know you have reservations about where other people’s butts and legs have been.  I know the concept of restroom etiquette may be new to some of you.  So let me outline my three solutions to this pee-on-the-seat problem for you, in order of personal preference.

Number one.  If we all band together and learn how to pee correctly on toilet seats (and again, that’s legs and butt on the seat, privates over the hole), then we can all sit our butts down in comfort and get on with our respective days.  Because let me reassure you, you don’t get herpes from toilet seats.  Or AIDS.  On a day-to-day risk basis, you really don’t even have to worry about infections or rashes caused by whatever awful flora inhabit other women’s thighs – you should probably be more worried about getting hit by a rickshaw on your way to work.  Just take a deep breath and get over your weird bathroom phobias and just sit the hell down on it already.  

Number two.  You can build up those quads and learn to hover more accurately over the really big water-filled hole (remember, that’s called the toilet bowl), rather than the little plastic ring around it.  Like I said, that hole is really big.  Your pee stream is comparatively small.  This is not NASA, this is hitting the broad side of a barn.  Even if your pee goes all wonky and starts spattering and running down your leg and whatnot, you should still be able to accomplish peeing into the toilet rather than onto it.

 Number three.  In a worst-case scenario, go right ahead – pee on the seat.  Pee all over it, and the floor and the walls and the ceiling, for all I care.  You know why?  Because right there next to the toilet – and I really, really hope you already know this one – there’s a roll of paper which was created for the express purpose of wiping bodily fluids off of surfaces.  Ideally that surface is your body, but if you want that surface to be the toilet seat then fine, I’ll happily support your right to wipe the everloving piss out of it (literally).  And you know what?  That paper is free.  Even in public restrooms.  You can use half a roll to clean up your waterworks festival and no one will complain.

Just please, for the love of God follow any one of the above three techniques to spare the rest of us the full tactile glory of your excretions, because I am tired of sitting on your pee.  I’m really damn tired of it.  Don’t make me come after you.

More Weird Juju

I told you about our weird juju weekend last March.  We had another weird juju evening this January that I thought you might like to hear about.

This time the juju object was very clear – it was this ugly beast (and don’t you dare say “but the truck it’s leaning on looks just fine…”):

That, dear friends, is our U-Haul truck that we drove from Arizona to Chicago – and the juju object is that horrible auto transport trailer attached to the back of it.

Husband is terrified of my driving.  I don’t think it’s warranted, but every time I drive over a curb when he’s in the car I have to concede he kind of has a point.  He was okay letting me drive the truck – he made me the night driver! – but he kept cringing and gasping and offering helpful pointers and advice and by the time we pulled into Chicago I swore that if I could just navigate the damn truck to our hotel destination without crashing then I would get Shut The Hell Up About My Driving (STHUAMD) rights for the rest of my life.

That oath was my downfall.

I swore that oath in my own head just as we were turning from the 55 onto the 94, which during nighttime rush hour was nothing less than an overwhelmingly congested evil many-laned Cerberus nightmarish unholy beast of a feat to attempt in a U-Haul the size of Texas.  I had to get over two lanes in about a block and NO ONE was letting me in because Chicago drivers are all (excuse my language) total assholes.

But out of nowhere, some angel decided to pause and let me in.  He waved, I waved, and I started to merge.

And then the bad juju exploded.

See, when that gentleman got to telling us the story later, he explained that he had thought our auto transport trailer with our car on it was just another sneaky Chicago driver trying to get in behind our U-Haul.  So what does my angel do?  He jumps forward to try and cut off the other car.  The other car which is attached to my truck.

All I know is I’m going along just fine and then all of a sudden that car is way too close and then there’s a screech and a thunk as the trailer and his bumper collide.

Simple as that, in a span of seconds, away flew all my STHUAMD rights.  Evaporated.  Forever.  And I still had to figure out a way to get back across three lanes just to get off the damn freeway and exchange information.

So after a lot of merging and getting shunted to other freeways and off ramps and neighborhood driving trying to find a spot big enough to pull over our four-axle cruise liner, we finally managed to stop and get things squared away (with a sprinkle of good juju, because his bumper was scraped up a little but our trailer was fine and we had damage coverage anyway even though we never buy damage coverage or insurance or warranties for anything in our blessed lives).  And then there we were, stranded in the dark in a strange city in a strange neighborhood about which we knew absolutely nothing.

We didn’t know what the hell to do.  We just turned right and right and right (and maybe right and right again, for all I remember) – and then the juju rollercoaster hit a new high.  Within a single nerve-wracking minute, there loomed a sign – for the 94 heading north!  Seriously, if you’d seen all the damn turns I had to make to get off that damn freeway, you’d be way more impressed.  Imagine we were in Wonderland or the Labyrinth or something.  It was like that.

Anyway, a few miles later we came to our exit… and the juju coaster plummeted again when we failed to locate our hotel.  I had thought the directions I had memorized would be easy (ha!) and instead we circled forever through a maze of one-lane tiny neighborhood roads searching fruitlessly for the damn place.  We eventually pulled over and the husband excavated his iTouch only to relearn that its battery was dead, and then booted up the laptop but found only poorly-named secured wireless networks in that isolationist little yuppie backwater neighborhood in which we found ourselves. 

So I called my sister to beg for internet help – and gave her the wrong hotel name because they all sound the same to me and I was being an idiot.  And still she managed to interpret my idiocy and sent some good juju our way in the form of accurate directions to our hotel, which was apparently only two short blocks away.

As we pulled into the hotel parking lot all full of jubilant relief at the realization that our horrible post-car-accident trauma was finally over, we caught sight of a Chipotle across the street.  Dinner secured!  The good juju meter was off the charts by now.

So we checked in and got back in the truck to re-park around the back of the hotel, got out all our belongings including our stuffed animals and overnight bags and musical instruments and potted plants (so that they all wouldn’t freeze in the car), and got to the door – and the juju flat-lined again when the husband started searching for our room keys.

For ten minutes we sat there rooting through all our stuff out in the cold trying to find those keys which we’d just been given mere moments before.  Nothing.  Finally some lovely ladies showed up and let us into the building, but that still couldn’t get us into our room which stood so agonizingly nearby around the corner behind the first door on the right. 

Husband finally gave up and bade me wait with the stuff while he went off to get a new room key from the front desk.  He was gone awhile, and I got bored and wandered over to the door to our room…

…And found it ajar.

I was already unpacked and watching TV by the time he showed up again.

Which Turtle were you?

I freaking love Ninja Turtles.  More so now than I did back when they were age-appropriate, certainly.  I miss my youth and am retroactively constructing a fictional fantastical view of how important TMNT really was to me.  This is aided by a relative dearth of readily available photo and video evidence to the contrary.  It’s further aided by continuing reminders in our (technically) adult household:

Recently discovered in a chocolate egg.  

Current home: Displayed prominently on the piano in the living room.

Modern turtle enemies.  What the hell are these guys?  

What happened to Bebop and Rocksteady?

Potentially the husband's proudest possession.  

Also on display on the piano.  Right next to the wedding pictures.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were pretty much the coolest thing my generation’s TV had to offer (kids these days think TMNT was made for them but they are SO wrong).  Any one word in the title would have been amazing enough for a little kid:  Teenage.  Mutant.  Ninja.  Turtle.  But you put them all together and suddenly you’ve got an unstoppable tsunami of Awesome.  With a capital A.

Who doesn’t still remember the theme song?  Who didn’t love pizza almost exclusively because of the turtles’ singular culinary obsession?  Who didn’t want to own all the action figures? 

That was the best Christmas present I remember getting as a child – a big-ass box of Ninja Turtles action figures.  And I got a life-size plastic version of Leo’s sword too (it was a sword to me back then, not a katana, because I didn’t know better).  And I promptly hit my sister over the head with it and got it taken away.  But those few fleeting moments of well-armed glory, they were magical.

The best part about the Ninja Turtles was that they were each unique enough to allow for favorites.  I think my interest in each of them has vacillated regularly throughout the years, but the truth is my heart is sworn to Raph and always will be.  Never mind that Leo dominates our household – that’s mostly the husband’s doing – or that most people think Raph is a whiny angsty baby (cf. that scene in the first movie where he spends the entirety of his farmhouse hideout time moping in a bathtub).  Raph isn’t exactly my favorite, but he’s my turtle.

Let me break it down for you, those of you who don’t know the turtles like familiar friends.  Kids tended to base their favorite turtle choices on one of three major attributes:

Yes, some kids chose their favorite turtle based on which Renaissance artist he was named after.  So what?  You got a problem with that?  You want to start something?  And clearly the makers of TMNT knew nothing about the Renaissance, anyway – the turtles’ names were totally misattributed in my opinion.  Leo should have been the tinkerer.  Mikey should have been the tortured brooding one, and Raph ought to have been the partier.  I had a really hard time in Art History class thanks to the Ninja Turtles.  Bastards.

Misattribution aside, I always wanted to be Leo.  I wanted to be a leader and have an awesome weapon and kick ass.  Or I wanted to be Donny, I wanted to be all scientific and technical.  But I got Raph.  Standoffish angsty hot-headed annoying Raph and his stupid useless sai.

This is because I had a dream when I was little.  Real little.  It was one of the very first dreams I remember, and it was long and perilous – I was a ninja turtle and I was stuck searching for hours through a neverending labyrinthine sewer system in a fruitless attempt to rescue April O’Neil from certain peril.  I was Raphael.  I can’t just ignore that kind of sign.  My subconscious chose for me.  It’s always going to be Raph.

Maybe this is why I always fall for angsty fictional characters, eh? 

It’s all Raph’s fault.

P.S. I just took an online quiz and I got Donny.  Figures.  You can also take the quiz here.

Google is your friend

It occurs to me that I may be too naïve and trusting a person.  I will probably be that little old lady who gives all her money to the nice Nigerian prince who just needs a money transfer because he lost a kidney while traveling abroad in Monaco, or whatever.  I have effectively already been that little old lady, actually, a few times in my life.  When I was working at Dairy Queen (it also occurs to me that I should apparently just have named this blog ‘Notes from a Dairy Queen’, given how much blog fodder those few short teenage months have thus far given me) this quite cute disheveled long-haired ratty-shirted guy once charmed me into buying him a whole ice cream cake “for a dinner for homeless people out in the desert” just by playing me a song on his harmonica.  I got duped into giving a psycho creepy stalker kid a kiss in a foreign airport.  On a rainy day, a family friend had me totally convinced the video of catastrophic flooding in Australia being covered on CNN was actually our backyard river.  In a series of factual blunders, I even managed to accidentally fool myself into thinking pandas weren’t bears and held that belief for years, and was so confident in my mistake I had other people in on it, too.  ‘Gullible’ might as well be my middle name.

Also, I tend to see no problem living in places one should probably avoid.  Prime example: when the husband went out of town for six months I moved into a smaller place more suitable for a single person living alone.  It was the size of a port-o-potty and was all sorts of broken-down – when the gas guy came by to approve the place and told me he couldn’t do it because the gas heater wasn’t up to code, the landlord just told me, “It’s fine, they always say that.  Don’t worry about it.”  So I just moved in and didn’t turn the heater on the whole winter.  The place was pretty much made of cardboard.  In fact, someone told me later about a friend of a friend whose house in Tucson was broken into after the burglar just kicked in the wall and walked in – and given the size of the hole I managed to put into the closet wall just by leaning a hand on it, I think my place fell into that same Laughably Easy burglarizing category.

But none of this really hammered home for me until I came home one day and realized I’d locked myself out.  I was sitting there staring at the door, wondering what the hell I could do – when out of the corner of my eye I saw an angel, an actual angel rooting through the big dumpster in our alley.  This homeless guy had with him a whole shopping cart of goodies he was diligently trying to augment – surely he’d have a screwdriver in there somewhere?  I walked over and explained my plight.  And sure enough he did have a screwdriver, and in under two minutes he and I had pried my window open and got me inside.  And you know what he said, while we were breaking into my house?  He told me, “This place isn’t safe.  I have a sixteen-year-old daughter and I would never let her live in a place like this.”

That’s how I got schooled that my house was potentially not my finest choice of living situation.

I’m looking for apartments in Chicago right now and I’m trying to keep these and other reminders in mind as I look at all these adorable places and fail again and again to remind myself that they are cheap because I am probably going to get shot walking out the door.  I’m not a good judge of these things.  But my friend helped me develop a great litmus test for checking out neighborhoods I know nothing about: 1) Google the address, 2) Find the closest park, and 3) Google the park name.  If you see news of a shooting, beheading, or bomb-planting in that park in the first five search hits, you are probably not about to settle into a nice neighborhood.  Seriously, this works.

If anyone could help me out with this whole Chicago thing I’d be deeply obliged.

Nerds are the best kind of people

I’ve just returned from the Arizona Browncoats’ sixth annual Can’t Stop the Serenity event, and if that didn’t make any sense then you’ve probably never seen the cult classics Firefly (the TV show) or Serenity (the movie).  Obviously I recommend both.  And I bet you wouldn’t argue with me that Can’t Stop the Serenity is a nerdy event.

This event represents exactly why nerds are the best kind of people.  On every scale, it exemplifies the very best that people can be, and what they can do when they come together for a good cause.

To summarize in one sentence, Firefly was a space cowboy sci-fi show that waxed profound in its portrayal of a group of mercenaries struggling to survive a universe that failed to appreciate their particular brand of morality.  Firefly has a wealth of fantastic messages enmeshed in it, about ethics, righteousness, equality, the list goes on.  I mean to say that this nerdy space cowboy show in and of itself was a production promoting the best kind of people. 

But it was canned in the first season by Fox. 

Enter the browncoats, the cult followers of Firefly.  Like the characters they idolized, they banded together for a common cause: to give a final voice to their favorite show.  They actually scraped together the cash themselves to fund a full-length film chronicling their favorite crew, and out of that sprung Serenity.  How awesome is that?

And it gets better.  Now around the country, browncoats put on annual Can’t Stop the Serenity screenings of the movie, and all the proceeds go to benefit Equality Now and other organizations seeking the empowerment and equality of women worldwide.  It’s a charity the show’s creator, Joss Whedon (of Buffy and Dollhouse fame), feels very passionate about.  Six years in, these screenings have raised over half a million dollars for Equality Now.

So yeah, all of that is great and all – strong moral messages and philanthropy and whatnot, it’s real nice.  But would you also believe that nerds are the most courteous moviegoers I’ve ever had the pleasure to sit with?

I know!  This is at a dedicated cult-movie screening where you’d expect people to be all rowdy and annoying.  And still no one yelled over the dialogue, no one clapped out of turn, and when the important bits came around no one ruined the surprises for anyone who hadn’t seen the movie yet (yes, there were two of them in the crowd).  One cell phone did go off, but the girl instantly turned it off and looked absolutely mortified.

The husband and I have all but sworn off movie theaters after our last twenty our so experiences where we’ve been subjected to people having entire conversations throughout the movies we paid ten dollars a ticket to watch.  But these browncoats were fantastic and their conduct throughout the whole evening – in the theatre, during the speeches and fashion show and front-running show screenings, milling around the lobby, even in the bathroom – was exemplary.  It was amazing.

I’m totally going back next year.

When the husband’s away…

Everyone has idiosyncrasies they choose not to display around other people.  Some of us do this because we’re prudish and self-conscious, and others of us do this because we don’t want to annoy the ever-loving piss out of our loved ones.  When my husband is out of town, my life changes in oh-so-many infinitesimal ways…

1. Loneliness is cleanliness.  Can you believe I’ve actually done the laundry every single week this month?  And the dishes?  And I’ve made my own meals for dinner?  You should see my house right now, it’s gorgeous.  It is absolutely miraculous what you can get done when you have no excuses like, “He totally put that there and he can damn well pick it up himself.”

2. Loneliness is craftiness.  I never would have scrounged up the sewing machine if the husband was around.  I’m making holiday costumes and learning to face-paint and cleaning things I’ve never cleaned before and mending things that really don’t need mending.  In husband-departures past, I’ve hauled out the acrylic paints or the earring-making supplies or the molding clay and gone to town.  Oh, and the husband was out of town for a couple weeks when I made the Stargate, too!  See?  I’m only ever creative when he’s gone.

3. The house turns bulimic.  With all the cleaning and all the crafting, the house pretty much waffles daily between being pristine and qualifying as a natural disaster area.

4. There’s this thing called ‘fruit’…  I’ve said we don’t eat in.  But as part of point one, I’ve been going to the actual grocery store and picking up actual fruits and vegetables and actually consuming them on a regular basis.  And the white nectarines in season right now are delicious.

5. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.  Normally I’m not much of a drinker.  No, honest.  But when the husband is away and I don’t have my regular social drinking partner and wine-bottle-sharer, I go crazy.  On days when it normally wouldn’t cross my mind once, I’ve found myself staring down the beer in the fridge and wondering how long I’m going to hold out before I start drinking alone.  I could shank a baby right now for just one good glass of white wine.  I’ve finagled my way into two glasses of wine this week and I’m still dying.  I think this defines alcoholism.

6. Cereal = all-day staple.  Cereal is no longer just for dinner.  Breakfast, lunch, second lunch, dessert, midday snack, midnight pick-me-up… it’s so versatile!  Especially when I don’t want to leave the house.  Which leads me to…

7. Self-imposed exile.  I’m a natural-born hermit.  The husband makes me leave the house to walk around the university, or get food for dinner, or buy things, or socialize.  But now, I don’t have to do any of that!  I can sit in a single spot on my couch all night and no one will bother me!  (Friends of mine, don’t get any smart ideas about taking me out of this in a fit of pious pity.  I like it.)

8. Forget personal hygiene.  I still brush my teeth twice daily.  But it can be hard to get up the motivation to shower when no one with whom you interact is going to get within a few feet of you in a given day.  And makeup and hair maintenance and cute clothes are all straight out the window when the bed is calling for you to sleep in just a few minutes more…

9. Cadaver nails.  That’s husband’s name for my fingernails when they start growing out of control, he says they look like when people die and their nails keep growing (I’ve heard this before, but I’m not sure it’s true).  But I hate cutting my nails.  HATE.  It takes forever and then you have to file them and I never had this problem back when I used to bite them off.  So when husband’s gone, the claws come out.

And finally…

10. Absolutely NOTHING in moderation.  At least, with regard to media.  The husband can only watch things once or twice before he gets bored with them.  He hates listening to music on repeat.  Me?  If I don’t consume everything a song or a band or a show has to offer, if I haven’t yet worn it like a second skin, if I can’t repeat it back verbatim, then I feel I haven’t really experienced it yet.  And when husband is gone, there’s no one to limit my addictions.  So far I’ve watched both seasons of Modern Family straight through four times.  Four.  That’s forty-eight episodes, back-to-back, four times over.  And each night I find a new song to fall in love with and play it on repeat for hours – last night it was Silver Sun Pickups, tonight it’s Mark Martel’s “Somebody To Love” audition tape for Queen Extravaganza (and my God, does that man ever sound like Freddie Mercury!  Be still, my beating heart!), and so on.  It never ends.

Anyway, I’d keep going on this list but my cereal’s getting soggy and I have to reorganize the pictures on the piano and I just reached the episode where the whole family takes a trip to Maui, and I really like that one.  Peace out!