Nobody Pays Any Attention to Me

Last night while waiting to go to sleep I ran a scene through my head that I'm working on.

They stood an the pier staring out into the ocean. She leaned against the railing and wondered about the man at her side. She was more than a little agrieved that he had insisted on accompanying her tonight and tried to ignore him without being rude.

"The breeze off the ocean is chilly tonight," he said.

"I told you to bring a jacket," she retorted. "If you're cold, go back."

"I'm not cold," he sighed, then added shyly, "I just thought you might need me to keep you warm."

She blinked hard. Was he hitting on her? Did she want him to hit on her?
She was too old to play games like this.

"You're right. The breeze is chilly tonight and your arms around me would feel good."

As I drifted off to sleep, his arms were indeed around her and they were locked in an empassionate kiss. "Really!" I thought, "That wasn't supposed to happen."

Later in the night, I woke briefly and saw the scene again. They were still kissing. In my dream, I whispered, "Excuse me," and tiptoed away, but you know I was thinking, "For Pete's sake, get a room."

I hate it when my characters refuse to take direction and start re-writing the script. Especially when they have more fun then me.

WARNING

I was listening to TV while I was writing that last post. I finally got up to see what was on because I could not believe how stupid it was. It was that new show Creature Comforts.

I really, really, REALLY hope this is the last week it is on. I know it's just the first week, but it's so bad it's makes me not want to watch TV at all because it's polluting the airwaves.

If you haven't seen it or the previews, Creature Comforts is an animated show with cute little animal characters. The critters will probably appeal to children, but it's not a kid's show despite being on at 8 PM. Here's an example of one of their jokes: I'm bi-sexual. I like to buy sex. Believe it or not, that's not the worst thing I heard before I changed channels. But even worse are the voices. I'm still cringing.

Make Your Bed

Does anybody know why pillow cases cost so much? They are made of the same material as the matching sheets, use about half the material as one flat sheet, yet cost twice as much as both the top and bottom twin size sheets. It's not that hard to sew one - there aren't any curves or darts or hand sewing. Sometimes there's some lace along the hem, but that's not difficult.

I mention this because I recently bought a pair of "hotel quality" pillowcases from Amazon.com for $8.00. That's not a bad price for even cheap cases, but for "hotel quality" that's great. I really don't know what "hotel quality" linens are. I never noticed that the hotels I've stayed in had especially high quality linens. It is a very high thread count, 1000 + something, so they should last forever.

Of course, at my age, forever isn't what it used to be.

Sunday Morning Chatter

I haven't bought my spring flowers yet. I only have one or two pots so it's not a major undertaking, but I haven't done it yet. I've looked several times, but just looking didn't put petunias in my pot.

I almost bought plants once, at that tent by Marsh's, but the clerk ticked me off by waiting on other people even though I was at her table first so I put the plants back and left. I'm not going to beg store staff to wait on me.

While I'm on the subject, have I mentioned how nice the young people are that work at Marsh's? For the most part, they are polite, well groomed, friendly, and helpful. I even made a point to tell the manager so on at least one occasion.

For some reason, I can never spell occasion right on the first try. I usually have two many s's and/or not enought c's so I have to type it several times and by then I'm so confused I don't know what I'm writing. Thank goodness for Spell Check!

A lot of the features in MS Word don't work to my satisfaction, but Spell Check is usually very helpful, much more so than the Grammar Check function. Sometimes it is just weird. Have you noticed that occasionaly you can change a phrase at Grammar Check's suggestion only to have it suggest you use the phrase you used in the first place?


Speaking of "in the first place", I'd like to tell you that this is a picture of my petunia pot, but I'd be lying and I'm not going to lie on Sunday morning.

Searching, always searching

I learned some new things today and thought I'd pass them along.

You can use the term "safesearch:" in Google to exclude adult content. For example, safesearch: sex education won't return sites with adult contents.

The word "date:" lets you search with a range of months (3, 6, or 12 months). For example, Olympics date: 3 searches for Olympics references within the past 3 months.

Do you believe this? I didn't. I had to see for myself.


So I googled "safesearch: sex education" (the phrase used as an example by Google). Most of the sites were about safesearch, some even listed the sites that you didn't get because you used safesearch.

The fourth site on the list had pictures of a nude female torso, a young man watching a woman disrobe, and a woman suggestively eating a banana. Not quite X rated, but not PG-13 either, by my reckoning.

I tried safesearch: spankings. This should have returned numerous sites about the use and misuse of physical violence as part of parental discipline, but actually returned more "naughty" adult sites than just searching for spankings alone.

Olympic date: 3 didn't work any better than safesearch. It gave me any web site with a 3 in a date, or that contained a 3 and the word "date".

As a control, I ran the sample experiment using the Advanced Search feature Return web pages updated in the past 3 months. It appeared to work well, at least on the first page.

The safesearch option under Advanced Search worked much better than putting safesearch in the google search box, but it wasn't foolproof. I didn't see any sites with dirty pictures in the first two pages when I googled sex education.


So what did we really learn here? Well, you may not have learned much, but the experiments were kind of educational for me.