A Bad Beginning for a Bizarre Book?

This could be a Bad idea ... Because it could be totally Boring - But I was in the shower the other night and I had this Bizarre idea, for the Beginning of a Book, just kind of create itself in my head, so when I got out of the shower I wrote it down ... and then decided that it might be handy for my B post for ABC Wednesday ;-)

so ... Be ready to Be Baffled, Bored or Bugged - here it is:

Aguor sneezed. He could feel the hot redness rise up from his hairy chest, to the top of his ears, and back down, even redder and hotter - red enough to be seen on his hairy cheeks and neck - as he realised that what he had sneezed was now lying on the tablecloth, in a soggy wriggling lump. A hairbiter - black, with lots of legs. Thankfully his hosts were educated enough not to be too upset - enough to know that hairbiters and other pests could be caught by clean people, if they had to mix with those who were not. Normally he would have engaged the services of a groomer, with a well trained snufflecat ... but as he had not left the crowded and unclean city via the normal road, but rather, he had fled just a little too hastily by diving into the sacred pink lake of saltiness and swimming to the lonely temple, he had thought there was no need - and there should not have been - the salt kills hairbiters and other nasty hangers on. As he was bald from the top of his mouth, up over his ears, and down to the middle of his back, he had figured it did not matter that he had not totally submerged his head - but he had forgotten about the hairs growing inside his nose!


... pretty Bad, isn't it?

I am not quite sure why I started thinking of Book Beginnings ... I am fairly sure it may have Been Because I was thinking about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest - a contest that, as it says on the website is "a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels" ... the 2011 winners are here ;-)
To enter this in that contest, I would have to remove that first full stop and replace it with "and" ... and that would give me 3 lines of horribleness until the next full stop ;-)
(which possibly means I shouldn't put it on my blog yet? ... then again - seeing you are probably the only person actually reading this I don't think it matters anyway - LOL  ... besides ... now that this post has sat mostly written but not posted for a few days, and I submitted that Beginning to the contest in Between writing Bits of this post - can I get in trouble for plaigarising myself by posting it on my Blog after i sent in the entry? Besides ... what can they do - take away my Birthday?  ;-)

Talking about Books ... which I guess I wasn't - Because that B$^%^t up above is only the Beginning of an imaginary Book - I do actually know a couple of REAL authors, who DO know how to write books!
I met them both on the #CSIROTweetup and I have read stuff written by both of them and really liked it.

One is Claire Corbett (her website is here ) I have a copy of her book "When We Have Wings" but I have not had time to read it yet (although I have read the first chapter ;-)  and I also read a short story she wrote, one that is the idea her book is based on - that is here (click on the page numbers to see the pages and read it) ... as if I didn't already wish I could fly ... now that I have read that - I want to fly even more ... if that is possible! LOL

The other Author is Patty Jansen (her website is here ) She gave me one of her e-books (so I could read it and write a review of it ... which I did ... but not sure if I am any good at that sort of thing - lol) and she also has several other stories/etc available as e-books some are Here on Amazon (some of them are free ... and what ones are free seems to vary over time ;-) and she also has some on www.smashwords.com ... where they have a whole pile of different cheap and free e-books - some are full length books, others are short stories or even collections of poems/etc (I have downloaded and read a few of the free ones, including some by Patty, on my iPad ;-) I read them while I was away over Christmas. I also downloaded a heap more the other day ... not sure when I am going to get around to reading them all ... I have enough trouble getting around to posting stuff to my blog! LOL (this one sat, mostly done, as a draft for a few days ;-)

btw ... anyone want to write the next page of that silly story? ... could be interesting to see what happens next - lol

ps ... needed a photo 4 the ABC Wednesday link [andrea has a quick look 4 one] ah - this will do - something I had for tea one night a couple of weeks ago - how about a Beef Burger and a Beer?!

"Here is one I prepared earlier" ?

This may or may not work ... (if you see nothing but a half a page of text, then it did not work ... at least not for you anyway)


I typed that bit of text and added the link that embeds the story in to this post, and previewed the post - and it seems to have worked ok, at least at this end ;-)
- I went to a website I had found out about (when someone else used it and tweeted their results) called Storify  and clicked on the "create story" button at the top and had a fiddle - it let me search for all my tweets (I could have also searched for any other peoples tweets or various topics, or Facebook posts, or some other stuff, but I only wanted some of my recent tweets for this one ;-) and it let me drag the ones I wanted into the thingy (complete with any photos I had tweeted) and add whatever words I wanted ... kind of fun - and a cheats way to turn a few days of tweeting stuff into a blog post all about it - LOL

Methinks I will be using that site again ;-)


Anyway ... here is the story, the "one I prepared earlier":



Gee ... that was just a bit TOO long eh? ... next time I will just do shorter ones i think ... might go back there now and whip one up for Spot, the Blog ... then if any of the 2 or 3 people reading this blog actually go and look at the "other stories by ..." link then they might find something - LOL

btw - because those photos are in something else that is embedded in this blog post (kind of same thing as when one puts youtube videos in blog posts/etc) the photos don't do the same as on my other posts - but you can still see them bigger if you want - just click on them and you end up at the photo on Twitter, and click on it again and it should give you the nice big version ...
(so - if you click on the photo of the yarn - you should get to see a bigger version of the Twitter picture I am talking about the yarn matching ... unless I have changed my profile picture or something - LOL)

Androids And Apples And Apps And Accounts And Annoying Computers And Stuff

Ok ... so that is a good post title for a letter A post, as we go into Another round of ABC Wednesday ... so ... Ahh ... er ... now what do I actually SAY? lol

I guess I was thinking I should post about that stuff because it has All featured rather a lot in my life lately ;-)

note: As this post has become Awfully long ... feel free to just look at the pictures if you don't want to read All that stuff I have raved on About ;-)

Anyway ...
I am not quite sure where it all started ... maybe way back - when DH bought our first computer, almost 21 years ago? LOL

Actually ... this little quilt, that I made last year, kind of tells the story - in fact that is exactly what it was meant to be About ;-)

... the words sewn onto the background are all the things I started playing with/using, and in the Approximate order I discovered/started using them ...
The couple on the right are the ones not quite in order ... Fractint is a computer program (still around but was less complex, but took way longer to do stuff, back then) that draws fractals ... can't remember when i started messing around with that ... probably not long after we got the computer - whenever DH downoaded and installed it and told me about it ;-)
The digital camera came sometime later ... if I had to put it in between the other stuf it probably would go between geocities and google - I was already using e-mail and yahoo stuff by the time we got our first digital camera (and now my PHONE takes better photos than that camera could!) I probably could have added more stuff like using various photo editing software and stuff ... but I decided that "digital camera" could cover all that stuff too ;-)
For the first few years we had the internet ... which I think we had access to before html/the www - DH used to run a "bulletin board" where people could dial up and download/upload files and e-mail or something like that ... but once web browsers and stuff turned up - I started "surfing the web" every now and then ... not too often - because when I did - I would sit at the comptuer, get "lost in cyberspace" and then it would be 8 hours later! oops?! LOL (some things don't change much ;-)
At about the end of 1997 DH called me over to the computer and showed me how to use the e-mail program to send/read e-mails, and to read newsgroups ... and he "created a monster" LOL  - I found a quilting newsgroup (and a couple of others) and joined in ... then someone on there told me all about Scquilters (the Southern Cross Quilters e-mail list) and I joined that instead ... that later moved to "e-groups" which got taken over by yahoo to become yahoogroups ... sometime after joining scquilters I was looking at someone's quilt website on geocities and got curious and clicked the link to "get your own Geocities page" ... just to see what was involved in case I wanted to later ... a couple hours after I clicked - I was up way too late And I had a website on Geocities! LOL
Sometime over the next few years I also joined a few other e-mail lists ... one or 2 of those have died, all the others either were already on, or moved to, yahoogroups ... and I also used to do quite a lot of "surfing the net" ... and signed up for a pile of different free e-mail addresses and stuff (on sites that have mostly died since then) ... and sometime or another Yahoo, and a few other similar websites started to get not so good (free yahoo mail forwarding kind of ceased to happen, and yahoo bought Geocities and then later on the killed it) and Google got better and became the main search engine ... and I found blogger and started this blog ... a year or 2 before Google bought Blogger - lol
I am still active on a few yahoogroups ... and, after resisting it for a year or 2, I joined Facebook ... and Twitter ... but still didn't use them for a year or so ... but then I realised that a pile of people I know from the Scquilters yahoogroup are now hanging around on Facebook ... so I relented just over a year ago, and let one of them drag me in - lol   Then I found that a couple of them were messing around with Twitter, so I had a bit of a fiddle ... that was in the middle of last year sometime - which is when I made that quilt  ... Twitter is kind of where I got the title for the quilt, but I still didn't think I was likely to use it that much, because it didn't seem to be my thing ... nor did smart phones (which DH took me shopping for a few months ago, and  I kind of wondered why I had one for the first month or 2 ... but then I found out about the CSIROTweetup - LOL ... so I started using Twitter (and Facebook) on my phone, and on the iPad that DH had bought earlier in the year (another thing I wasn't sure I would use much, although I did use it for Gmail and Facebook while we went on a holiday in the middle of last year - I posted photos of all the different food we ate ;-)  funny thing is I think now I use the iPad more than he does - lol)  ... once I worked out how to use the thing, I also started using a heap of other apps on the phone - some that I found out about during the tweetup, and a few I have found since, and then when I went away for Christmas I started using a few things on the iPad (mail and e-books mostly).
I think in the last month or 2 I have probably spent more time on Twitter than on any of the other things! (but I have it set up so my tweets get posted on my facebook - lol)

er ... this has got rather long - and that was kind of only part of what the title of this post refers to!
I was also going to mention how, when I went up to visit Mum and Dad for Christmas/New Year, I spent quite a bit of time fiddling around with all that sort of stuff - because Mum bought an iPad just before I went up there, and she was having a few problems with her computer/e-mail ... and if you have not used Any Apple software or Anything with Apps or signed up to many things where you have online Accounts - it can take a bit to get one's head around it All ... and I am no expert either - I just play with it - LOL  ... but I ended up doing all sorts of odd stuff like using my phone as a wifi hotspot so mum could download iTunes and a big iPad software update (her dodgy internet plan did not have enough data left to use to do that, but my phone plan did ;-) and setting up e-mail stuff on her laptop (a fairly new one, not her first, but a different version of windoze that is a real pain to find how to do stuff in) and then setting up her new internet stuff - she changed from a wireless dongle on a network where she only had a bad signal, to a plan where she gets a lot more data for only a bit more money and has a little modem thingy that connects to 3g and is a wireless hotspot that she can connect either her laptop or her iPad to (which solved the problem of her wondering "should I have got a 3G one instead of just a wifi one?" - she can use her month's worth of data on either the laptop or the iPad rather than needing 2 different plans ;-) Trouble is - that stuff all had to be installed/set up/etc ... so Mum was glad I was there to help figure it all out - LOL
Also, while I was there to help set stuff up, Mum decided that seeing she had such Awful wireless reception from her ISP, she would change over to Another one instead (one that has better 3G coverage in her Area ;-)  ... so I ended up helping her find her way through the maze of Accounts and passwords, And had to explain All About how the Admin password was for the thingy that connects to the net and then sends out the wifi signal that her laptop and ipad need Another password to Access and that those are Additional to the password/login she needs to Access her Account/e-mail/etc on her ISP ... the sort of stuff that can be Absolutely confusing At first, but All makes sense once you get your head around it - probably All stuff that I have learnt About a lot more slowly over the years, while watching DH set all that sort of stuff up while I just used it All ;-)

... and this is where I Added a few ideas (below) for the rest of this post, then left it As it was for a few days (although I did just Add a few more words and stuff to the bit Above)

And maybe some Additional A stuff?

As if this blog post needs to be Any longer?!!!! ... Anything I might have Added, I will be Able to use next time Around the Alphabet - lol

Authors?! (the 2 I met on the Tweetup and how/why I am reading their books? ;-)

er ... yes I did want to mention that About now, but it will Also fit quite neatly in with what I am planning to do for my letter B post, so it will Be in there, if I get Around to Actually writing the B%^&#%& thing ;-)


Anyway ... this post is probably Awfully boring with so few photos ... so here is Another one:

"Aggie's pants" (Agapanthus) ... I took the photo, with my phone, a day or 2 ago, and I just noticed , as I was putting photos into an Album on the computer and choosing which one of  3 Agapanthus photos was going here, there is An Amazing thing About this photo - there is Also An Arachnid on the Agapanthus flowers! (the pink hand is pointing to it ;-) 

I Am sure I have some other Amazing photos I could put in here, but I keep getting lost on Twitter before I get Around to uploading them from the camera's memory card ... and I am not doing that now because DH and I are About to go out, As soon As he gets home from work (unless he has changed his mind since he rang me from work earlier today) - And I want to try and post this before I end up being too late ... Again 
(oops - he is home, hope I have not left Anything out/messed up, because I am About to post this As it is and hope it is at least mostly Alright ;-)

Zarya, Zvezda, etc ...

So ... "What on Earth are Zarya and Zvezda?" you ask? Well - actually they are NOT on Earth! They are 2 modules of the International Space Station (ISS) that is orbiting around the Earth ;-)

Zarya was the first module launched, then Unity, then Zvezda (If you are interested, there is more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarya ... and from there you can follow the links to Zvezda and other stuff ) This website - http://www.zarya.info/ - has some interesting info on the use/history of the name Zarya (it was initially the call sign of mission control for the flight when Yuri Gargarin orbited the Earth ;-)

Zvezda means "Star" ... which is about how bright the ISS now looks when you watch it fly over!
Zarya means Sunrise/Dawn ... symbolising the dawn of a new age of space exploration or something ... and I guess there are definitely some exciting things happening at the moment (like the failed Phobos-Grunt in a decaying orbit and due re-enter the Earth's atmospehre at some random time in approximately 2 days time, and the MSL mission (Curiosity rover) due to land on Mars this August ... I hope they have another CSIROTweetup for that, and if they do - I hope I can sneak off from work to go to it!)

Talking about Dawn ... that is when I went to bed "last night" - LOL  but - there is one advantage in having been still up at that stupid hour of the morning - I got to go outside and see the ISS fly overhead at 4:12am ;-)
(it has also been visible here in the evenings this week - but either I forget to look until too late, or it is too cloudy ... sigh)

To find out when you can look up and see the ISS fly over, one can just search on Google/etc for ISS sightings or something ... or go to http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/ or http://www.heavens-above.com/
If you are into Twitter - you can also follow @twisst to get sent alerts when it is due to be visible flying overhead ;-)
And if you have an iPhone or an Android phone ... there is at least one App that tracks satellites/etc and tells you where to look in the sky (the app I have on my phone tracks lots of stuff, including ISS, and the doomed and soon to re-enter Phobos-Grunt)

I did take a photo of the ISS with my phone - but it just looks like a tiny white dot on a black background - not worth uploading here ;-)
I don't have any recent/new photos of a Sunrise either, but I did take a photo of this Sunset over the house as we drove off to have tea at a pizza place with a name starting with Z, a couple of days ago.  lol


[the next day] ... seeing this was meant to be my Z post for ABC Wednesday, I probably should have uploaded the photo and posted this yesterday (seeing it was already late then, and is now even later) ... but I kind of never got that far ... sigh ... but I might have a couple more Sunset photos now ;-)  I took some on my phone when I was walking the dog this evening ... and then the dog and I got home just as the ISS was flying overhead ... not directly overhead, and some thin cloud - so not bright enough for any decent photos (besides - I would probably need to set up the camera on a tripod to get any photos that actually looked like anything other than a white dot in a black background - lol)


Anyway ... Here is the Sunset over the house the other day:

 yes - it really was that colour!

And here are the other Sunset/etc photos I took, with my phone, while waking the dog this evening:
(I took some with my camera too, but they are not on the computer yet)

pink sky and hills

this is what normally happens when trying to take photos of the dog, or the cat:
photo of said animal at least part way OUT of the photo!

orange Sunset

closer up (taken just after other one)

a few minutes later (from a slightly different place)

Sunset reflected in the pond

more Sunset reflections in the pond

Diesel, wishing I would let him jump in the pond  and chase the swan that has come over  - probably to see  if we have any food ;-)

Just for fun - the same photo after I played with it in GIMP (a very useful bit of  photo editing software that can is free to download from the www) I was going to make it a bit lighter because the original (above) is rather dark ... but it didn't look any good when I made it lighter (all the colours became distracting and ruined the effect - the darkness is part of what makes it a photo I like - kind of moody looking, or something ;-) but I quite like the effect in this one too.

While I was playing with photos in GIMP ... I decided to play with the lightness and contrast of another photo I took this evening - I was trying to take one of the ISS as if flew over (using my phone ;-) but it was way too dark and the photo just turned out black, with no sign of the ISS or even the stars in the sky ... but when I upped the contrast as far as it would go, and same with the brightness, but one number less - I got this rather interesting "noise" effect, which I quite like - it kind of looks like an abstract art quilt or something ;-)

oh ... one more Z thing I just have to mention seeing this is meant to be a post for the letter Z ... something that someone Tweeted reminded me ... a piece of music that I love, partly because it was used as the theme song in the film "2001 A Space Oddesy" but also because I like it anyway - is a rather dramatic piece called "Also Spake Zarathustra" ... LOL
Oddly enough ... I just looked it up (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Also_sprach_Zarathustra_(Strauss) ) and it says that the initial fanfare - the bit that was used in the film - is called "Sunrise" - which ties in nicely with where this post started - the name that I already knew, that gave me the idea for this blog post - Zarya, which means "Sunrise" ;-)

(so now that I have gone full circle, maybe it is time I hit the "post" button before I bore you all so much that you turn into Zombies? ;-)

Wishing you a Merry Christmas, Where have I been? Where am I going, and other Weird stuff.

"We Wish you a merry Christmas, We Wish you a merry Christmas ... " etc ... I don't have time to go digging in my photos and make up a Christmas card right now, and I didn't do it earlier because I seem to have been rather busy doing all that other stuff people do when not sitting in front of the computer (and a bit too much getting lost on Twitter when I have been at the computer ;-)  ... not sure if I will get to do it later either - because I am going away ... DH is working night shifts over Christmas, so he is staying home (which is handy because else who would look after the cat and the dog ... DD maybe - seeing she will probably working Christmas Eve and Boxing Day) so ... I am hopping on a plane tomorrow, and flying to Queensland - to visit my parents for a week or 2 ... and they don't have huge piles of download to use each month like I do here at home, or GIMP on their computer  ... lol

But ... because I have not posted for a little While ... and it may be a Week or more before I post again (depending What I might find in the Way of free WiFi/other Internet access ... and/or Weather I feel like going off and finding some McWiFi - lol) I have decided to Whip up a quick post With a few Weird photos of Weird stuff for the Wonderful ABC Wednesday's W Week ;-)

Wow! - I just realised - now that it is after Midnight - I am actually posting this on a ... Wednesday! LOL
(but the linky thingy isn't there yet - I will have to remember to try and find a spare 5 minutes to log in to Blogger While I am at Work tomorrow and add my link then ;-)

now ... What Weird and Wonderful stuff can I find photos of in a hurry? (I still need to organise a few things because I have to be packed and ready tonight, because I leave pretty much straight after Work tomorrow) and I still have not taken the dog for the Walk I promised him (he doesn't care What time of day/night he goes - lol)

OK ... found some ... and they uploaded quite fast and Worked ok - Wonderful!

These few Were all taken with my phone ...
(might be why they loaded fast - smaller photos than my camera is set up to take ... but the couple of camera photos I put in here also loaded fast ;-)

Some Weird Wet person (me ;-) at the #CSIROTweetup:

the same Weird person (me) Wearing a Wig With antennae on it - at the #CSIROTweetup - next to a model of one of the Mars rovers ;-)

Weird animals ... Waiting for a scratch?

 ditto:

Cat's Whiskers: (white ones ;-)

Weird sky

Weird sky again - the clouds really Were that colour!

What is this? and Why is it on my desk at Work?!

yes - it IS a live possum - I work at a high school, and Mr E's class Went into their sceince lab one Monday morning (about a week or 2 ago) - and there, in the corner, was a possum! (it had been living in the roof, and fallen through the ceiling tiles ... they are fairly sleepy during the day so it was easy to just grab a box, stick it over the possum and shove it's backside into the box, shut the flaps and carry it out of the room ;-)

 (btw - that last photo was not my from my phone - I also took a photo with my camera ;-)

oh - and the possum was released into some trees. later in the day.

This is also a camera photo, not a phone photo
... and this one was yellow because it was taken with the flash off (I took one with the flash on too, but I like this one better ;-)
The colour could be said to be a hint as to what I was doing at the time - I just happened to have the camera in my pocket When I Went to ... do What I Was doing in there ;-)  and the dog Was Waiting for me to finish. (he doesn't like it if you shut the door, and if you don't actually close it properly he just pushes the door open and comes in anyway - lol

... and this is some birds Walking around.

I was walking around too - with the iPad - which is what I used to take that photo ... and yes it is a boring one - I only put it in here to see what would happen ... because I probably had the ipad upside down when I took the photo - the thumbnail was upside down ... but (because the ipad knows which way up it is?) the photo comes out the right way up when it is opened ... I got curious to see if it was upside down in here ... no - that just seems to happen at random when there is a glitch - lol (had that happen once ... rotated a photo that I had taken sideways, and it looked fine, as a thumbnail and open, on the computer - but it came out sideways in here! - weird?)

Anyway ... time to finish messing around, and post this - While I still have some night left to Walk the dog, organise the other few things I have to pack/etc, and also squeeze in a good night's sleep before I have to get up for Work in the morning (oops? ... that adds up to a bit more than the approximately 7 hours that it is going to have to fit into!

"but Wait - there's more"

I almost forgot to add the first photo I found - was not going to put it first - figured it might gross a few people out a bit much being right at the top - more Weird stuff at Work:

Yes - that IS a plastic bag of EYEBALLS ;-)

better in the plastic bag than here!

 ... high up on the Wall!

... it was a particularly rowdy class that disected eyballs the day this happened ;-)
(usually the leftover chopped up greebly bits come back in the trays or whatever, and I just have to scrape them out and bin them, and wash all the trays/scalpels/forceps/probes/etc, rather than having to find a long stick to remove greeblies from the wall, and go find a mop and clean the ceiling!  ... "and what did you do at work today?" "well, I scraped an eybeall off the wall, and mopped the ceiling ... "  I guess it keeps the job interesting - LOL)

and ... if it Works (it said there was an error, but now it says it is uploading ... I guess I will have to "hurry up and Wait" for a While to see if it worked, and try again if it didn't)
here is will possibly be a link to a video of some Wonderfully Wild and Wooly Weather:

(it wasn't uploading on blogger, said "rejected by server" or somesuch - so I decided to try putting it on Photobucket instead ;-)


hmmm ... maybe it wasn't such a good idea to start uploading a video at 1:30am, and then noticing that it is 298MB in size! ... dog is now walked, other bits I had to do are done (unless I have forgotten something) it is now almost 4am ... and 25% of it has uploaded ... I wonder if there is a size limit? LOL
I will post this, and add the video later, if it uploads, (and if I can log in to photobucket and blogger some time/place and do what I will need to do, and if I remember ;-)

[the next day] OK - here it is (it took half the night, but seems it did upload ok ;-)


The video was taken at around Midnight one night late in November ... it was rather stormy most of the night, but for over half an hour it was like this - constant flashes and booms - amazing!
(kind of made me imagine weird things - like maybe it was elephants who had become angels and they were having a disco in the sky ;-)

Tweet, tweet, tweet ... Having a terrific time at the #CSIROTweetup

Ok ... Yesterday I left work early and Went out to the CDSCC (Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex - http://www.cdscc.nasa.gov/ ) and spent an absolutely wonderful evening at the #CSIROTweetup (news article about it here - http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/11/21/3354487.htm ;_) ... we then stayed the night out at a school camp near there, and we are now in at CSIRO Discovery and the talks are about to begin ... And tonight we go back out to CDSCC to do it all again ...
Actually I can probably keep blogging during the talk, in between eating bites of my lunch ... Multi tasking?! LOL

Actually it is kind of funny ... A whole bunch of "tweeps" having a Tweetup in a radio quiet area (the telescopes need to be able to "hear" the signals from the spacecraft they are tacking, and there isn't any phone signal out here, in fact we have to turn all wireless devices off or to airplane mode ... so we have all been cut off from our usual connections to the www/etc. ... Apart from several computers they set up for us to use :-)
... So here we all are ... back in town with mobile phone coverage and guest access to a wireless network ... So everyone is sitting in the lecture theatre, phones/iPads/Netbooks in hand busily tweeting, emailing, checking phone messages and what have you ...
(I am trying to do this on the iPad but I am adding the links and a few other bits later when not using the iPad - LOL )

[later the same day ... er ... actually it is the next day, just - have not gone to bed yet - late night coming up]
oops - the lectures got too interesting (actually the first one was too - but I had already heard almost the same one a couple of months ago so I could kind of listen and blog and still understand it all ;-)

After the lectures/etc we had some spare time - which a few of us spent the first part of at the pub - lol - then we headed out to a nice picnic area by the river on the way out to CDSCC and had a BBQ ... and then we all arrived here at CDSCC for an entertaining evening of sharing computers to tweet/etc/eating party pies, watching stuff on the big screen at the front of the room, listening to someone talk about NASA and stuff, and generally have a good time ... now we are watching the NASA live coverage of the launch (of http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ for those who have not looked at the other link at the top - lol)

ooh "T minus 1 hour and 9 minutes" ... woo hoo - getting excited ...

ok ... time for some photos ... yes - I was the first one here to look at the computers and think to myself "oooh - usb slot - might try connecting my phone/camera"... worked fine with both of them ... but first ... here is a photo that I DIDN'T take - this is a group photo that one of the other "Tweeps" took and tweeted a little while ago - and is now saved on my phone - LOL

And here is a photo I got someone to take of me, last night ;-)

And guess who?! ... well - I had the wig with antennae so I had to put it on ... and the person organising things just took this photo and tweeted it ... so I "borrowed" it.

and now that I have monopolised the computer for way too long - someone else's turn ... should be just under an hour till launch now ... time to see if there are any party pies left ... LOL

I wonder if I can call this an early Wednesday ABC post, seeing we are up to the letter T in a couple days?

[edit: I decided "yes, I will ;-)" just added the letter T link here and am about to go add this link to the linky thingy there]

Some Roses are Red ... and So are lots of other Somewhat Random things ...

Really? ... who would have thought ... lol

... yes - if you think I write about some Rather Ridiculous stuff - you are proabably Right ... but I am not going to Refrain - I will go Right ahead anyway - because it is past time for those of us doing the ABC Wednesday thing to post about stuff starting with the letter R and now it is time for the letter S ... and there is at least one of these R things (which I was also going to post about again as an S thing anyway, because it really is S related ;-) that I Really wanted to post about anyway ;-)
I decided to make this an R and S post because I am not sure I will have time to do another totally S post between now and next week ... (if I do then I guess it could be a Second one?)  ... although most of what I will be posting about, if I do get a chance to post Stuff this week, is also Related to, and part of, what I was planning on blogging about for my letter T post ;-)

Righto ... let's get Right into it?  ... first R thing is the Rover that will be Rolling over ... the Surface of Mars - "the Red planet" ... no - not the the ones that, Remarkably, are Still Rolling Round the place (well at least one of them is ;-) but the one that is now Sitting on top of a Rocket, Ready to Roll onto the launch pad Rather Soon - the Mars Science Laboratory - which is a Rather large Rover called Curiosity - due to lift off and head out into Space (which is why this is Really an S thing too ;-) in 9 er ... make that about 6 (because I didn't finish this the day I started and it is now about 3 days later) days time (and Land on Mars next August I think)... unfortunately I live a bit to far away to just Rock up to watch the launch, but, provided it does take off when planned, I will be doing the next best thing - I will be Right in the middle of the action at the CSIRO Tweetup, here at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex ;-)
Strangely enough, the launch has just been delayed by a day, meaning it won't be happening in the wee small hours of Saturday morning (Australian time), but in the wee small hours of Sunday morning instead - which is a bit Sad for those poor Sods who booked cheap flights that they can't change, or have other places they have to be on the Saturday night - because they will miss the actuall launch ... but, because it was too late to change all the other plans (guest speakers and Stuff) all the other fun Stuff, apart from the live cross to the USA during the launch, will Still be happening ... and then we get to go back again on Saturday evening for more fun Stuff and do the live cross for the launch at about 2am Sunday morning, and get to spend another night out at the place we get to Stay at on the first night. (provided the launch isn't delayed/Scrubbed or something ... which, unfortunately, is possible)

So ... this S part of this Rather odd post might only be a fairly Small part of it - but it is a Rather Significant bit as far as I am concerned - LOL
If any of you lot (all 3 of you? lol) reading this are on Twitter - I am @UTLAU - and even if you are not signed up to Twitter yourself, you can find, and look at, my twitter page at http://twitter.com/#!/UTLAU
(I am not sure how often I/we will be "Tweeting" during the actual event - for one thing - we are going to be rather busy having our guided tour, eating dinner, listening to all the guest speakers, etc ... and the other - there is probably no phone/etc reception out there anyway, and even if there is - the place we will be during the guided tour, and the launch of the MSL mission, is a "radio quiet" area so we will have to turn our phones/iPads/whatever off, or to "flight mode" anyway ... but we will have some access to computers that are connected to the internet ;-)

Anyway ... now to Resume the previously written R post ... which I should have posted a week ago, but it took me a few days to get around to writing it/finding what photos I wanted to put in, and then a few more days to actually get said photos onto my blog ... not sure if it is me or them, but uploading photos seems to be a pain lately ... works ok for a while, sometimes, and then it just seems to hang ... grrrr ... and unfortunately I do sometimes have to do other things besides sit at the computer getting lost on Youtube or something while waiting to see if things are working or not ... sigh ... LOL


R is also for Round and Round in my head ... which is what is currently happening with David Bowie's song "Life on Mars" - LOL
(note to Self: maybe I Should put that Song on my phone, so I can play it /sometime during the Tweetup ;-)

R is also for Remembering what other Relevant R things I was going to post about ... but I know I have Rather a lot of photos that I have taken Recently - an amount would be several Rolls of film, if it wasn't for the Recent Replacement of that technology by Digital - what a Ripper of an invention that one was ;-)

I guess I should go and Rummage around in my photos, and See what Results I find ... it is amazing how many Random things I found to photograph Recently, that were Red, or otherwise R Related ...

btw ... when I decided to walk the dog late this afternoon, I only had room for 3 more photos on the memory card in the camera, so I took that one out and put an empty one in ... it now has 72 photos on it!
(and I also took a few more photos with my phone ;-)

[a day or 3 passes]
er ... I Really should finish this post before I Run out of days in the week before it is next Wednesday (and time for the letter S)
(oops! LOL)
... and I think that Red is a bit TOO Red Mars seems to look a bit more like this colour in the photos anyway ... LOL

I guess I should stop Raving on about Random stuff that is probably Really boring, and find a few Reasonable "R" Related photos to put in here ...

I just Realised that will Require me to Remember, or look at the blog post to Remind myself, which ones of my Recent photos I have already posted (I Remember that the Red hot poker flowers were in my P post ;-)

Hmmm ... a couple of these photos could be S photos as well ... which is probably a good thing, Seeing this R post kind of became an R and S one - lol
I uploaded the rest of them last night, but it was a bit late to stay here adding captions when I had to get up for work today ... so I will add them now, and then I can hit the "post" button before this post becomes as Ridiculous as the Rather Strange R post I found Saved in my "drafts" (I might have to be Silly and post that one next time we ABC Wednesday is up to the letter R, if I don't think of something better ;-)



Red flowers, looking Rather Striking actulaly ;-)



the roof of my car just before I went to work last Monday morning - there is a tree next to where I park the car (there is a branch of that tree poking into the top right corner of the photo) and it dropped a whole pile of bits of flowers, and sticky nectar as well, onto the roof of the car ... and then a whole pile of those plague soldier beetles gathered there - I presume to continue eating the nectar.



this is about 15 or 20 minutes later - after driving to work (at speeds of up to 80kph) - some of the beetles are Still on the Roof!

this is a closer up shot of the flower bits and beetles (taken a few days later I think)



Some Red and blue Recycling bins Ready for me to put them in the Science classroms at the school I work at.

Sunset, Refleced on the water (while out walking the dog)



Red Sky ;-)



Reddish light Reflected on the path ... which also has a heap of Snails on it ;-)
(btw - my mobile phone Rang just as I was trying to take this photo - lol)

Roses ... Some Red and Some ... not ;-)

Red Roses ... Rather wet ones (I was walking the dog in the Rain ;-)

Srange Red light - from the Street lights Reflected in the foggy Sky

Same Reddish Sky, with the moon - this was the Sky just to the Right of the Sky in the previous photo ... lol

Red flowers in a coutryard at work (same Red flowers as the ones in the first photo, which are in my garden at home - in fact I think the ones in my garden were grown from bits that fell/were broken off these plants at work ;-)

Red chairs in a corridor at work ... in front of the principal's office actually ;-)

Red flowers ... "Bottle Brush" flowers ... a species of Callistemon (not sure which one - they are an Australian native that has been bred into a lot of different new varieties for gardens/etc)

Rainbow colours in the camera lens (and another one of those Red flowering Callistemon bushes ;-)

a Rose



a Red gutter, and a Rock at the front of the school I work at
(actually the long building in this photo is part of the science block - where I work ;-)

Rust dyed fabric ... actually Rather Rotten too - this is what happens when you decide to "dye" some fabric by wrapping it around some rusty wire and stuff and bury it in the garden for 2 or 3 days  ... but then don't Remember that you did that until it has been there for 2 or 3 MONTHS ... oops? LOL  (I will still find a use for it eventually ;-)



a Reddish orange Grevillia flower ... we have some Strange looking flowers here in Australia ;-)

Ok ... photos now have captions ... which I am still not sure I like the look of how blogger does that ... but it takes ages to get them all lined up neatly if I try and write in between them because all the html tags that get added with the photos tend to mess up the formatting or something, which it also does a bit doing it this way, but not quite as badly ... and the only way to make things look neat/how I want them to is to edit the html code and delete them all - and that takes ages ...

btw ... for those who want a closer look a a weird flower/beetles making beetles/whatever other weird thing in one of these photos ... these are actually quite large photos (they will probably not be quite so large after a while if I keep posting this many every time I post to my blog - there is actually a storage limit for photo on here ... but, from what I read somewhere on a help page, because I have google+ I get to keep uploading stuff after the limit is reached, but anything over a certain size will be made smaller automatically). Anyway ... if you want to see these photos even bigger than they come up in that thingy you get when you click on one - do a right click and open it in a new tab/window and it should come up the full size (which even if I have reached the limit and my new photos do get re-sized as I upload them, they will still be a lot bigger than they appear in the blog posts ;-)

One last S related thing ... DD (Dear Daughter) came wandering in to the room the other night, while DH (Dear Husband) and I were watching TV or something ... and she asked if it would do anything bad to a keyboard if you drew/wrote on it ... when asked why she wanted to know that she answered: I want to write "the final frontier" on my Spacebar ...

(and if you don't get why she wanted to do that - you need to go and watch a few episodes of Star Trek ... even one episode ... or even just the Start of an episode - lol)