Some Artsy-Fartsy Shots of Sis's Pool (Now With Cheap New Night Lights!)

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I Had The Pool All To Myself, And It Was Excellent. So I Took Pictures.

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LIFTOFF! The Barnes Family is Officially Airborne!


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The Widder Report

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We Can Haz Hatchlings?

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In Which I am a Surrogate Spouse and Parent to a Bird Family


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*bangs cooking pot with a great big spoon*

EVERYONE GO VOTE FOR SPIKE/FRED HERE! --> http://nekid-spike.livejournal.com/4095589.html
IT'S A LAST-ROUND POLL! AND THEY'RE IN IT! ithinkyouhavetobeamember BUT IF YOU ARE A MEMBER, GO AND VOTE FOR THEM! YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO VOTE AGAINST SPIKE/BUFFY TO DO IT! ('Cause they're in another category.)

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE GO GIVE SPRED A VOTE, AND I'LL PROMISE TO STOP SCREAMING AND POUNDING ON KITCHEN APPLIANCES!

Also, thank you, eilowyn and velvetwhip, for the niftly blue dragons on my profile! (One of them smells suspiciously like pepperoni.)

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Here's a weird thing: since Feb. 8th I've gotten e-mails telling me about new comments on three (so far) stories I posted in spred. The e-mails show me what the comments are, but when I look at them in the actual spred community posts, they aren't there. The comments are all in Russian, from LJ accounts that are also in Russian. I ran the comments through an online translator and got this:

trainorilo:
Доброго времени суток! Не вижу условия использования информации. Можно ли копировать написанный вами текст на свой блог, если ставить ссылку на эту страницу?
Good time of day! See terms of use. Can I copy the text you have written on your blog, if you put a link to this page?

nedrudyxab:
Хороший пост, но много лишнего.
Good post, but a lot of superfluous.

gurlopiq:
Отлично. Ждем новых сообщений на эту же тему :)
It's cool. We are waiting for new messages on the same topic:)

It looks like spam -- did LJ recognize the comments as spam and automatically delete them from my posts? What would make spammers choose those particular posts? Could someone fluent in Russian (bats eyes at moscow_watcher) look at those journals and tell me what they think?

Справка! HELP!

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CAROLS!

Yes, pathetically I'm still trying to do Christmas stuff one month later. I was so busy and exhausted and stressed before and right up to December 25, getting it ready for others (and may I say right now that there's a special place in Hell for self-centered deadbeat relatives who every year deliberately fail to provide Christmas for their children because they know that my sister and I will do it to keep their kids from suffering major disappointment and unhappiness and they don't care that it straps us of every cent we've got AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!)...that I didn't really ever get to just relax and sit down or travel around quietly and enjoy the music, decorations, movies, community events, etc. The only time for that was late at night, when I was too tired to keep my eyes open. So I kept telling myself that between Dec. 26 and New Year's, I could do all those things...but in my part of the country, everything Christmasy gets yanked down then, and everyone but me is sick of Christmas and doesn't even want to discuss it anymore. And then I feel rotten for feeling cheated, because I've got so much to be thankful for and I'm acting like a big whiny self-pitying douche who can't stay out of the Christmas Clearance aisles.

ahem...ANYWAY...found this on Youtube: music videos of four guys pantomiming Christmas songs while dancing, beaming, and appearing to get progressively drunker by the verse. They're my new favorite holiday classics! :D

"Christmas in Killarney"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGstrljksN0

"Good King Winceslas"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMmxhhfQw0c&feature=related

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My Christmas Decorations, Part 3

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My Christmas Decorations, Part 2

These are close-ups of some of our tree ornaments.( Read more...Collapse )

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My Christmas Decorations, Part 1

HAPPY EPIPHANY / TWELFTH NIGHT / LITTLE CHRISTMAS / THREE KINGS DAY! (give or take a few hours.) I’ve loved looking at the holiday decoration photos that folks have put on LJ, and now I’d like to post my own.

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Season's Greetings to everyone! I haven't had time to go online much at all for the last several months, but I'm determined to catch up at least a little bit today. I love looking at the photos people have posted of their Christmas decorations, and if I can find my camera I'll try to put up some pictures of our decorations as well.

In honor of New Year's Eve, I wanted to share with you a beautiful version of "Auld Lang Syne", performed by The O'Reilly Consort and included in their CD "A Celtic Christmas: Carols for Celtic Band." Unfortunately I could only find a small snippet of it online. Click on this link --> http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=4867599
then scroll down to sample 9 and click on that. It's only thirty seconds long, but it's a lovely highlight, with notes and key that are very different from the traditional version of the song. The other songs on the CD are wonderful, too ("Oikan Ayns Bethlehem" is especially memorable; almost haunting in its beauty.)

Happy New Year!

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Amish...Vampires? Oh, Lord.

Two of the biggest current trends in popular literature are: [1] Amish Romance novels (written by non-Amish authors, and I often wonder what the actual Amish people think of those books) and [2] Paranormal Romance novels (frequently starring gorgeous, emo vampires.)

Therefore, someone has written a novel that combines the two. ( Read more...Collapse )

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YEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS!

THE DALLAS MAVERICKS HAVE WON THE NBA CHAMPIONSHIP!

I think I just shit myself. :D

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alison_swift has purchased some mini BtVS figures and posed them with appropriately silly captions. Heeeee! XD

http://alison-swift.livejournal.com/165517.html

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Fic Rec:

Here's a wonderful drabble in which a Muslim slayer and a Jewish slayer give Buffy a small lesson in weaponry and religious faith.

Cross-Cultural Exchange by beer_good_foamy

http://beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com/160130.html

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Boobage Removage

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Oh Hai There, Mastectomy! We Meet Again!

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*staggers in*

Whew, I'm home from the hospital, where I had a hysterectomy this weekend as a precaution against a spot on one of my ovaries. Fortunately the spot turned out to be harmless -- NOT cancer after all -- and now I don't have to worry about getting uterine, cervical, or ovarian cancer, so it was absolutely worth the trouble. Now I'm sitting here with a neat vertical incision from my crotch to my navel and a bottle of Lortab for company, trying to get caught up on a week's worth of Live Journal.

It's good to be back! :D

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