if the quiz didn’t make things clear to you, use the handy chart below to resolve your grrliness quotient.

general girls goody two shoes always says please sweet and neat too tired to party wearing the wrong thing can’t, shouldn’t, won’t the safe path early to bed

tengrrl! deliciously wicked always a tease kiss my feet energygrrl wearing the wrong thong can and will the safety dance we have to go to bed?

2004 is the Year of Tengrrl! follow my lead and complete this questionnaire to determine your outlook on life for the year. if your answers don’t match mine, you are not doing a very good job of aspiring to grrlhood. you must try harder.

1. what does tengrrl really want?

besides ruling the world, which would ensure a constant supply of diet brown soda, i want to post a lot of stuff here so that my page is more interesting than rich’s.

2. what makes tengrrl full of grrlness?

diet brown soda, silly. isn’t that obvious from the previous answer? oh, ok, really my grrlness springs from my inner being. a grrl just is. there’s not much you can do to aspire to grrlness. you either are or you aren’t.

3. what does tengrrl flourish, prosper, and thrive?

diet brown soda. geez but this is redundant.

4. what gets tengrrl booted (e.g., up and running, not kicked out)?

um, diet brown soda. is this a consistency quiz?

5. what makes tengrrl’s mouth water?

diet sprite… ha. thought you’d trick me, didn’t you? everyone who is anyone knows that the true grrl craves diet brown soda with salty snacks, chocolate snacks, and greasy snacks. that takes care of all four food groups.

6. what’s tengrrl’s favorite way to misbehave?

other than posting silly information on the web?

7. what does tengrrl find very ungrrly?

tang.

8. what do bunnies make you think of?

snuggly, cuddly cuteness.

9. what if Dude weren’t okay after he got ambushed at lookout in Rio Bravo?

humanity as we know it would have been obliterated as reality skewed into a world where Krispy Kreme donuts were never invented.

10. An evil force appears to be stalking your friends. What do you do?

well, first, i would consider removing the evil force without telling them, but hell no grrl risks her life if people aren’t gonna know about it so that they can worship her. so i guess next, for a fleeting moment, i’d consider the option of squealing in fear, crying, and then calling upon the gods to save me and my friends; but that won’t work either cuz you can’t be a grrl and squeal like a pig at the same time. a very, very powerful grrl might try to use love to cure the force of its evil ways; but how the devil do you love a force? and besides there are far better things for a grrl to spend her love on, and they require far less penicillin than evil forces do. so next, i might think, “okay, i’ll challenge evil to a duel”; but unless i happen to have exploding snaps on hand that’s not likely to work and even then it’s gonna take a long time. so finally, the correct answer would come to me:
          tell Fred to put ICON away and stop annoying people.

tengrrl’s new year’s resolution
it’s a new year for me! this year, i will make an effort to post at least once a month. i’m doing this for me because i want to feel like only a partial slacker. and i want to know that my accounts have not been reaped for non-use. this is the year that i’ll make it happen!

i know it won’t be easy, but this is the year i’ll overcome the things that have stopped me in the past, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of sleep.

this is the year that i’ll dedicate myself to monthly efforts. i’ll do whatever it takes to make it to my goal and more, including skipping breakfast, sleeping one less minute per week, and ignoring the phone when it rings. and after all, i only said an effort, not that i’d post each month. that means i only have to randomly think about it. i don’t have to be a blogoholic like rich.

i’m resolved, and i’m going to do it: this is the year i’m going to make my dream come true. this is my year!

Only Absent

bittersweet indescreet discretion obsession confession cessation intention.

no. it’s not that. no. not at all.

it’s only absent. the long quiet road. travel without. you will know.

Subject Lines

what does it mean that my inbox has subject lines—today, teapots, and technotes? what does anything mean actually? maybe.

Broken Links to Fix

spent much of the day fixing broken links. marcopolo runs linkscan on readwritethink ever other monday, so every other monday, i get to fix two weeks of damage. we had a little extra damage today because of the changes at the ncte website. since nearly every url at ncte changed, nearly every link to ncte was broken at readwritethink.

i also finished proofreading a k–2 lesson on collaborative writing and a 3–5 lesson that uses comic strips to storyboard narrative writing.

i have been exceptionally boring otherwise. did some filing and such. procrastination really. i need to write another technote. i blame sauron.

A Drizzly Day

there’s been a blithering blather of blog messages on my discussion lists today. must be something in the air to make everyone suddenly have questions. since i still hate the word blog though, i don’t have to participate in the conversation unless i want to. for now, i have a few other things to manage. mostly organizing financial stuff, but also exciting weekend stuff like the laundry.

it’s been a drizzly, chilly day today. i never did get outside for a walk, well not unless you count the trip to take the garbage can from the backyard to the curb. as exciting as that trip is, i don’t think it actually counts for anything on my weekly activity chart.

i meant to get more web pages converted, but it didn’t happen. oh well. i did get other stuff done that really needed doing a bit more. and it’s before midnight and i have the dishwasher going, my lunch packed, and Harry Potter I is almost done on the tv. i may actually get to bed before the single digits arrive!

Quicken Documentation

the first time i saw paris….

ok, i’ve never actually seen paris. i’ve driven through paris, kentucky and paris, texas; but neither was particularly exciting.

i’ve been ignoring my webbage today, while reading up on the exciting world of financial management (which is a snobby way to say that i spent a couple hours reading quicken documentation so that i could figure out how to do what i wanted to do).

if only it were as easy to organize life as it is to lay out a web page. even if you allow for the nonsense of browsers and platforms, it’s still boatloads easier to smack a table on a page than to figure out how on earth to file your papers so that you can find them again, let alone how to enter all your bills so that they are actually paid when you actually have money in the bank. banks are picky about wanting you to have money when you send out checks.

but enough of that nonsense. i’m tired. my body is complaining about the 4 miles that i’ve walked today. it’s a lovely, crisp autumn night. i believe that my bed will be warm and snuggly. not as warm and snuggly as it could be if {fill in this blank with the name of an excellent hunk} were there to be my snugglupagus, but it will do. besides, it’s late. maybe he’s snuck in there when i wasn’t looking. he’s bound to be sleepy and ready for bed by now too.

Converting from Blogger with Dreamweaver

i’ve managed to use the dreamweaver template that i created to convert the base pages for the site. none of the subpages, like the lists of ten themselves. and i skipped the travelogues, mainly cuz i’m not sure what to do with them. they’re more journal entries than anything else. i may just convert them into archives for the changelog. i could move over those and the older changelogs to create past entries that i just hardcode links for into the blogger template. lots of the other stuff is hardcoded, so why not that too?

not sure how much i’ll get done on all this during the weekend, but at least i have a plan. i have some other things to get to—like napping, sleeping, and resting.

Discombobularity

it’s beginning to feel as if i spend as much time fighting with mac vs. windows issues as i do actually writing anything. font sizes may be working now. but really who knows? i’m in such a state of despair that the muse of discontent settled upon me with sad rhymings.

i am so hungry i could eat a squid
and jesus is getting jiggy with the mayo
my father says i’m a very bad kid
he’s just mad cuz i won’t obey — oh!
the wheels on the bus go round and round
but the monkey in the back is screaming
he’d really like to but he can’t sit down
cuz the fish sticks can’t stop dreaming
it is so sad that things are thus:
the man right there in the greasy pants
is most certainly not Locke’s Gus
yet singingly, he does the dance
i’m just a rhinestone cowboy
oh dear puddin’ come to me
you make this life a pure joy
for jesus, the mayo, and me

i pray this woe will lift soon. it’s all a matter of discombobularity however, and no one can really know what turn bob will take next.