Red Monkey

Pulling the Plug

Red Monkey — 2013-05-20T20:09:47-07:00

I started this blog in 2005. It looks like I'm ending it 9 years later. The last post I wrote was one of the best pieces of writing that I've done in years. And not only did I get no comments at all, I got just one person's response on Twitter. I've long since abandoned all the blog sites ... Cre8Buzz which will always remain in my heart, BlogAdvance, BlogThis, BlogMad, BlogCatalog, BlogTheOther. I neglected, in my "heyday" if I really had such a thing, to join up with BlogHer. Maybe that was the fatal mistake. Or, maybe, it was the...

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The Bruising Will Come Later

Red Monkey — 2013-05-17T18:01:26-07:00

The last few weeks had been difficult. Seemed like one thing after another was just not working. But today? Today had been a good day. The sun was shining - though, to be fair, the sun is almost always shining in New Mexico - work was good. When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the place I worked, I had only two things on my mind: the weekend, and my drive home. My drive home because there was construction by the highway and people are afraid to merge in construction in New Mexico. Though that sentence shouldn't...

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Scout's Palace

Red Monkey — 2013-03-24T18:46:13-07:00

So, Scout has used a little cat carrier for years as her kennel and loved it. But her back is not great and she was starting to balk at having to duck into it to go in. (She could stand inside, but the doorway was short.) The real problem ... is that kennels are ugly ... and this needed to go in the living room. I've seen some kennel-tables for sale, but they seem to be $200-$300 and they really don't match our decor at ALL. So I decided to make my own. I didn't think about doing a step-by-step originally, so I don't have a ton of pictures,...

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Middle America

Red Monkey — 2013-03-02T10:02:38-07:00

The high cost of health care is sooooo in the news lately. As if this is suddenly some kind of revelation. I saw a headline and a tweet today that claims - as if this is news to anyone in the real world - an ER visit costs more than a month's rent. No shit, Sherlock. Where have you been for the last 5-10 years (at a minimum), Captain Obvious? And the answer I've heard repeatedly from well-intentioned, well-off folk with fancy insurance benefits is a saccharine, "Can you really put a price on your health?" As if that is the end-all,...

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Fictions We Tell

Red Monkey — 2013-01-18T06:47:48-07:00

What's real here and what's not? Eric Hansen asks regarding the Manti Te'o about the hoax or scam regarding his girlfriend. I'm not really sure why it's national news that a college football star might have manufactured a girlfriend story and then manufactured her death. Or maybe he was scammed into it. I'm not really sure why whether or not Mark McGwire, Jose Conseco, Alex Rodriguez used steroids to achieve great things in baseball is news. Or why it's news that Lance Armstrong doped, but Armstrong's and Te'o's stories have hit at the...

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Fictional Histories

Red Monkey — 2013-01-15T06:27:40-07:00

I wrote a story once where the main character was talking about childhood heroes. Max had grown up reading those storybook American Biographies and latched onto the fictional histories. ...(well, I wanted to be like [Kit Carson] 'til I found out he was responsible for the Navajo's Long Walk, then I'se just mad), or or how I'd like to be ole Walt Disney (well, okay, bad example, but I didn't know then that he was some kind of C.I.A. or F.B.I. spy and a McCarthy-ite to boot), or Kermit the Frog (there, see, I found one that is still good and...

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The Television Humour Polarization Postulation

Red Monkey — 2013-01-03T19:46:32-07:00

I have found that many geeky people - self-proclaimed or not - tend to eschew things considered "popular." I think the more you are used to being on the "outside" for liking to program or enjoying D&D or what have you, the more you begin to suspect that "popular" things are simply boring ... or vapid. I found myself falling into this trap with Harry Potter. I love smart children's books. I love good fantasy novels. I refused to have a thing to do with the Potter books at first because how could a children's fantasy novel wind up on the NYT...

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I Woke Up This Morning

Red Monkey — 2012-11-05T17:35:48-07:00

I woke up this morning, happy to go to work. I was relaxed, I was eager to get to my day. I wasn't trying to escape from home. I wasn't dreading the work ahead. Content and eager. I drove in to work, marveling at the mountains, the sun playing with the crevices. Oranges and pinks playing in the tiny bits of wispy clouds and reflecting down on the mountain. Driving down the mesa until the sun just POPPED out from a crevice, brightening the remains of the volcanoes to the west. I was singing along with Los Lonely Boys at the top of my...

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Brave

Red Monkey — 2012-06-26T22:09:36-07:00

Yep. What the internet needs is another blogger writing about Brave, but I'm gonna do it anyway. There will be spoilers. If you haven't seen it and you don't want spoilers, come back after you've seen it. First, I have to say that I've been a fan of Celtic mythos in general since I was a wee li'l monkey. I read tales of Cuchullain, the Red Branch. I found Morgan Llewellyn's stories of Fionn MacCumhaill. Amerigan the Bard. I decided around the age of 6 that since my mother would not tell me "what we were," that I was Irish. I liked the...

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Akashiya Natural Bamboo Brush Pen

Red Monkey — 2012-06-23T13:09:31-07:00

So. Quite a while back, Mike Rohde hooked me up with JetPens. I'd never heard of the company...but now that I had, whoa. So, JetPens primarily makes available to the US the awesome pens available in Japan. Since I prefer rollerballs at a REALLY fine point, this looked like a good fit to me. It's been a while and in the spirit of full disclosure, I've placed multiple orders with JetPens since that first introduction. They're a relatively small and niche company, but don't let that fool you. For the pen connaisseur, the artist or just an...

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Yeesh

Red Monkey — 2012-06-13T20:27:27-07:00

So. Movable Type is re-installed temporarily. Comments are still non-functional for now. If this installation is hacked again, I'll kill the damn comments permanently and just write posts manually. If that happens, I'll have to kill the reader feed as well. I'm not going to manually write HTML for posts and then edit a second file as well. I'll use MT to post one last time before that happens, so if you do only read me in your reader, you'll get a warning. The nice folks at JetPens sent me an awesome brush pen to review. I've used it a bit...

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Diet Coda

Red Monkey — 2012-05-24T20:21:10-07:00

Downloaded Diet Coda today and I'm trying it out. Hope to re-install the blog software this weekend and make comments active again, not that anyone really comments here any more. Gotta say, for the HTML/CSS editing that I do via iPad, this Diet Coda will be a godsend. Still have to see if I can stand for it to replace Dreamweaver. Probably can, but $50 (today only) for Coda 2 seems hefty. And if I wait, it'll be $100. I don't tend to use more than TextWrangler any more, though, so that makes me question whether I really need anything more...

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Red Monkey — 2012-05-08T15:35:46-07:00

I was teaching first-year writing at the University of Notre Dame. The room was lit only by the snatches of dull, grey light from the two small windows and the glow of my students' monitors. They were working on their papers in class. I was there to help them when they had questions. How to address comments I'd written on earlier drafts, how to cite something, how to prove their point sufficiently or transition from one thing to the next. If I'm working on something, I don't do interruptions well. So, I had nothing to work on. My job was to...

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Don't Hide Your Light

Red Monkey — 2012-04-10T21:15:43-07:00

Made primarily from Sculpey, includes a light pack inside, glow-in-the-dark paint inside and the bodies of both butterflies are glow-in-the-dark Sculpey. Sorry, blog software still uninstalled, so no comments. You can hit me up through the contact form at the top if you want to let me know what you think. I'll manually publish comments if you indicate you want me to do so. Click to look.

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Hacked

Red Monkey — 2012-04-02T19:35:11-07:00

So. Movable Type is completely removed from my server until I figure out what's going on with the hacking situation. That means comments and search are kaput for now. I spent about 7-8 hours Sunday trying to get all the files cleaned up, but since I don't know how they're getting in, I'm not going to screw around and leave that as an opening. Kinda scratching an itch with a big-ass sledge-hammer, but there it is.

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