Monthly Archives: November 2013

Dagmar’s Birthday

Wheee! What a fun day!

Today was Beloved Wifey’s birthday. I made her pancakes for breakfast, though she thought they were biscuits (I’ve never made pancakes before – they kinda got a bit out of hand). In the afternoon Wifey’s Mama came over with a fantastic Thanksgiving/Hanukkah/Birthday dinner. Towards evening my family stopped by for a brief visit. My brother has a Golden Retriever almost exactly the same age as our little Buttercup – the two dogs had a ball! When it was time for the family to go, our Buttercup kept trying to get in their car, and their Aspen kept trying to get in our house…

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Geesh

I have a love-hate relationship with my bed. I love getting in and I hate getting out.

My dentist hates me. I’m passive-aggressive. And I love garlic and onions.

I have self-image problems. I hate the sound of my own voice. Also, I’m funny-looking when I speak. I’ve seen pictures. Overall I come across much better when I keep my mouth shut.

The number eight is hard for me to write. I also dislike typing the word “source.” They take too much time. I hate wasting time. Someone should figure out an easier way for me to complete these tasks. I have suggestions, but I’m not sure where to send them.

I MISS PLAYING IN A BAND.

If everyone had a childhood like mine, we’d all be a lot better off. Seriously, the worst thing that happened to me, ages three through fifteen, was an unexpected encounter with a very small garter snake. My parents left me seriously well-balanced.

Kinda wish I’d have known that before I turned thirty… I always thought I was special. Angst-ridden. Moody, but in a special way. Dark, but not dangerous. Turns out I was just from Iowa.

Not real often, but every now and then, just for a moment, I wish I knew what I was doing.

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Quickies

They say you dream so your brain can revisit and process the day’s events. What do my dogs dream about? Their last nap? All they do is sleep…

We don't sleep ALL the time, sometimes we just nap.

We don’t sleep ALL the time, sometimes we just nap.

I haven’t been able to fit my hand in a Pringle’s can in 35 years, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. Every. Single. Time.

The world needs fewer songs about sex, violence, and cars, and more songs about dogs. Doggies are nice.

Often I’m more intrigued by an object’s shadow than I am with the object itself. The shadow changes, minute by minute, season by season, while the object stays the same.

There is a certain amount of shame that comes with eating an entire can of Pringles in one day. But after you’ve done it a few times you get over it.

We’ve been getting a nasty, blasty south wind pretty consistently the past few years, which is no fun as we have no windbreak to the south other than the neighbor’s hog confinement (did you know that turkey bacon tastes just as good as “normal” bacon?) – the wind just whips through here. I’ve planted some trees to the south, and will plant more trees when the opportunity presents itself, but I’ve been wondering lately if I shouldn’t just build a big wall around my acreage. But then I’d have to start referring to it as “The Compound” and I’d probably end up on some government watch list for kooks. Kooks in Kompounds.

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First World Problems

4:32 a.m.

I have to go to the doctor today for a routine checkup. I have to fast for eight hours prior. I hate fasting. Not only did I eat a huge meal at 9:30 last night, but I lay awake all night eating popcorn, Honey Nut Scooters, and bacon, but I got up at 4:30 in the morning to have my Last Meal (which Beloved Wifey cooked for me) so I won’t starve to death by 1:30 in the afternoon. Eggs and ham! I ate so much I could barely waddle. I hate fasting.

8:04 a.m.

I’ve survived thus far on naught but weak black decaffeinated coffee. This sucks. I find myself weak with hunger, and snappish of attitude. I hate fasting.

8:37 a.m.

I’m not sure, but I think I just blacked out for a minute there. It’s been three and a half hours since my last meal. I hate fasting.

10:12 a.m.

Having difficulty concen… Concentr… Finishing a thought. I will now eat half a stick of sugar-free chewing gum. I’ve been saving it all morning. I hate fasting.

11:40 a.m.

It has now been over six hours since my last meal. My stomach is gnawing on my liver, asking me for onions. For the last forty-five minutes I’ve been seeing visions, hallucinations. They all involve hamburgers for some reason. Hamburgers. Wonderful, wondrous hamburgers. I hate fasting.

12:42 p.m.

Time to head to the doctor. I’ve asked my Beloved Wifey to drive me. I have tunnel-vision, and lost feeling in my extremities quite some time ago. The ravages of extreme hunger are cruel indeed. I feel numb to the world. I can do naught but stare, constantly aware of the nagging hole in my soul. I hate fasting.

1:30 p.m.

I’m sure the doctor will hospitalize me. He’ll take one look at me and will realize what he’s done to me. “Oh my gosh,” he’ll say, “you’re wasting away! You’re but a shadow of the fine man I saw just a few months ago! No, please don’t try to walk – we’ll get a wheelchair for you, you’re much too weak to walk on your own!” He’ll then pat my fevered brow and will write a prescription for two steaks a day, with potatoes. I’m sure of it. That’s what will happen. I hate fasting.

1:31 p.m.

They’ve called my name, and I’ve managed to drag myself into the little examination closet. No one seems to have noticed the ravages the fasting has caused me. I’ll try not to pass out as I sit here, waiting, endlessly waiting… Doctors always make you wait. In my enfeebled state I find that to be an atrocity.

1:32 p.m.

“So how are we today,” the doctor said as he came in the door, eyes focused on his iPad, paying no attention to my emaciated, withering frame. “I see you’re here for some blood tests. Have you been fasting?”

“Yes,” I whimpered. “Yes, I have.”

He glanced up from his iPad, looked at my belly, then, “Good. Looks like you could use it, you’ve got a few extra pounds there.” Eyes back on his notes, “Everything here looks good. Just go down the hall to your left and they’ll get your blood…”

1:42 p.m.

Back in the car with Beloved Wifey. “It’s okay, Honey, I can drive,” I said. “I’m glad that’s over!”

“Oh, okay. Where do you want to go for lunch?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m okay,” I replied. “I’m not hungry yet. I had a big breakfast…”

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Photo by HippieBoy Design

The Day’s Ruminations

There Are Good Things…

The past few days have been pretty good, all things considered. Beloved Wifey is still ill and is having a lot of trouble getting around, but we truly feel there may be an end in sight. The thought of having a healthy Dagmar next spring makes me all happy!

And there have been other little blessings. Pops came over with his tractor and helped get some of the junk metal out of my grove, and I was able to get out there with the chainsaw and clear some deadwood out (it’s a never-ending project, that). My back isn’t nearly as hurty as it was last week. I’m very nearly finished with my last large photo project of the season. Things are good.

So THIS is why statistics are important…

Random SEO Cogitations

I often get asked about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – the technique behind getting your web site boosted higher in the search engine rankings. Here’s what I told a friend of mine earlier today: 

Here are two articles that explain SEO fairly well. The first one is very detailed and explains how it all works, what you can do, and what you can expect.

The second article explains why you don’t need to do any of it.

In my experience, there are just a few things you can do to increase traffic, but websites like ours will never be getting 3,000 hits a day – it’s just not going to happen. There’s not a market that large for big numbers. (I remember back in the beginning of time when “hit counters” first started coming out. People were amazed that their sites were getting 10,000 hits a day – fantastic! The problem is that those weren’t real people – they were getting five hits a day. Four from themselves looking at the silly hit counter and giggling in glee, one from their mom, and 9,995 hits from search engine robots.)

The best ways, in my opinion, to get good results are pretty simple.

Have a good, solid site with engaging content. That gives a visitor impetus to remember your site and come back again.

Make sure your “keywords” are in your site somewhere. If you don’t say “I do graphic design in Sioux City, Iowa,” in the text somewhere, Google won’t have any way of knowing that you do graphic design in Sioux City. That sounds simple, but it’s the one thing most people forget.

The third thing is to give it time. The search engines all send out little “spiders” that crawl the web, looking for new sites, categorizing, indexing, and combing through the text. It sometimes takes a month for Yahoo or Bing to trip over your brand-new site. And when it does, the search engine won’t give the new site a whole lot of credence – the longer a site is up and active the higher your ranking will be. (Active is a key word there – you need to update the site occasionally or the search engines assume the site is dead and it will start to drop in the rankings again.)

It also helps if you can build links. The more people who link to your site, the more important the search engines will think your site must be. Mention your site in a blog, or on FaceBook. That helps.

But the best way to get people to your site is to market the heck out of it – make sure it’s on your business cards, start a business page on Facebook and G+, make sure you tell prospective customers to check out your site. I still get most of my customers from the phone book. “I saw your name in the Yellow Pages, checked out your website, and I’d like to hire you to take our family photos…”

If you’re interested in getting a website designed, please check out HippieBoy Design – it’s what I do! 

 

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Big Sillies

The IRS

Seriously? They said what? Aw c’mon now…

I’m happily self-employed (HippieBoy Design for all your Graphic Design, Web Design, and Photographic Needs!), which means my taxes aren’t being automagically taken out of my paycheck, and I never know exactly how much I’ll need to pay in for taxes when they come due each year. It’s always a bit of a surprise. We try to balance it out by taking extra taxes out of Beloved Wifey’s paychecks throughout the year. It works, sort of.

Last year it turned out that we miscalculated, and I had to pay in a considerable chunk of change – much more than we’d anticipated. So we set up a payment plan with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and started making monthly payments. We’re happy to pay our fair share – I enjoy having roads, clean water, safe food… It’s all good.

Take My Money!

Hello, IRS? Yes, here’s my retirement fund…

Worried that we may accidentally forget to make a payment (they didn’t send us a “payment book” or anything), Beloved Wifey called the IRS to set up automatic withdrawals so the monthly payment would come directly out of  our account. Won’t that be convenient! She was on the phone for over an hour and a half making the arrangements – something that takes, literally, two minutes to do when do it online through a private company. (Have you ever seen the “Bill Me Monthly” checkbox on your phone bill? That’s all we wanted to do.) An hour and a half! That was in April.

The IRS people said it would take a “month or two” for the automatic payments to start coming out of our account. “The payments are due on the fifteenth of each month,” the lady told Beloved Wifey, “if the payment is late you’ll be held responsible and there will be a penalty. You’ll need to send payments in until we start the automatic withdrawals. Once we start the automatic withdrawals you’ll see it come out of your bank account on the fifteenth of each month until your bill is paid.”

My wife interrupted, “Wait, I don’t understand. We won’t know when the automatic payments start? We have to wait until midnight on the fifteenth to see if you’ve taken the payment out of our account before we can send a check? But if you didn’t take the automatic payment out, we’ll be penalized for a late payment?”

“Yes. And the penalty will go on your record.”

That was April. Our last payment is in December. It’s now November – they STILL haven’t started the automatic payments! Each month we have to wait with bated breath on the fifteenth to see if they’ve taken their money, then have to scramble to get on the phone with them to make a payment over the phone to avoid a penalty.

Seriously – we WANT to pay our fair share of taxes, we really do. But it seems like the IRS is actively trying to make it as difficult as possible for us to do so.

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The Politics of Facebook

It just takes one comment to ruin my day.

I discovered political science in college. My instructors had us read political theory, learn the different forms of governance, trending political ideologies. In the years since I’ve kept up with current affairs. I take this stuff very, very seriously, and I know what I’m talking about.

Years ago I was told in no uncertain terms that my views were NOT welcome on FaceBook. People didn’t want to hear my thoughts. In fact I lost a considerable amount of business due to my outspoken views on Facebook. Accordingly, I shushed. I created a small list of folks I could discuss politics with and have limited my thoughts to those select people. So I find it highly, highly irritating when the very segment of folks who castigated me years ago for speaking my mind have no problem speaking theirs – especially when their views often amount to reposting slurs and untruths.

It’s very easy to create a list of your friends who share your passions. It takes mere seconds to add someone to a list. Please, limit your political and religious posts to a list of your friends who want to hear those things – and please take me off that list.

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Random Happiness

Yep…

Happiness and Joy

I saw a TED Talk yesterday that’s still bouncing around in my head a bit.

The clip points out that we have put happiness on the far side of success, that we believe that if we work harder, longer, faster we will be successful – and THEN we’ll be happy. But our definition of “success” changes as soon as we get near it (“I will be successful when I earn twenty thousand dollars a year,” lasts precisely until two days after you hit that goal, at which point you change your definition of success – “I will be successful when I earn THIRTY thousand dollars a year,”) which means we never achieve “happy” – it’s on the far side of success. What we need to do is find “happy” now and let success follow.

The presenter gave some concrete methods of how to rewire our brains a bit to achieve a happier state – including writing down three things you’re grateful for each day, journaling about one positive experience each day, and committing random acts of kindness. While I’m not a miserable wretch of gloominess, I very much tend to live in the Dark Side – and I’d like to change that a bit. So, throughout the day – and hopefully every day – I’ll list a few things I’m grateful for and will scribe a paragraph or three about happy happy things.

But first, here’s a link to the TED Talk itself:

I’m Grateful For…

…having a relatively stress-free relationship with my wife. While we sometimes disagree and have occasional spats (about once a year we need a good, old-fashioned, stomping off into the night kind of fight), we’re both strive to be as supportive and understanding as possible. I know without a doubt she has my back, and I hope she knows I’ve got hers. We’re on the same team.

…having a job that allows me to be home to help Beloved Wifey through her illnesses.

…having a warm, snug house for my family.

And off we go!

I have much more to say today, but it’s time to run Beloved Wifey to a doctor’s appointment. Sadly, she’s not doing real well lately

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