July 12th, 2007
After quite a lot of thought and inner debate, I’ve quietly come to the decision that I need a fresh start somewhere. While I’ve enjoyed writing all of these years here at The Naked Truth, I realize that just like the blog before it, I have grown from my experience here and changed and am ready displace myself.
I still have things to say — hell, I still have quite a few opinions and heck, a whole new election year is coming. 
However, I’m not feeling the anger I’ve felt in the past in regards to
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tags: My Life
May 21st, 2007
I can’t remember the last time I had a good night’s sleep. Lately, it just seems so much worse. I feel so agonizingly tired all the time and my fibromyalgia had been getting better but now it’s back with a vengeance. I know what the doctors said — no rest, no ease of pain. I just feel like everything hurts, even my eyeballs.
This morning I finally accepted the truth.
Aloof is a lot to blame for my lack of sleep and something has
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tags: the cats, the puppy, sleep deprivation, black cat, retraining a cat, photo blogging, flickr
May 21st, 2007
Yesterday morning, something, crows, I think, brought down my bird feeder. I had been watching birds come and go, but got distracted with the computer for about 10 minutes and when I looked back at the picture window, the bird feeder was on the ground in several pieces.
My neighbor’s bird feeder appeared to be MIA as well so I’m betting it was those rather large crows I saw flying about that morning.
I added it to my Lowes shopping list since I was going that afternoon anyway.
That was a
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tags: bird feeder, crows, Nemesia, Lowes, fire door, fire code, photo blogging, flickr
May 17th, 2007
The Canon PowerShot S3 IS has arrived. The Canon PowerShot SD110 is out. Yay!
I have a lot of buttons to figure out. There’s a lot of features to learn. However, I can already tell just from toying with it even in the dreary, rainy, overcast light we have today that the new camera is 100 times better. It’s going to be so much more fun to use.
Tuesday night my mother pointed out that I was really hard on the SD110. I’m going to have to be much nicer and kinder
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tags: bird watching, Rusty Blackbird, Blue Jay, Northern Cardinal, Chipping Sparrow, photo blogging, Canon PowerShot S3 IS, camera, Canon PowerShot SD110
May 17th, 2007
Pugly has managed to catch Kennel Cough again even though he’s been vaccinated. He was up all night the last two nights coughing and yesterday morning, he vomited. So instead of daycare, I took him to the vet. The vet put him on home rest and quarantine. No daycare and no visiting the neighborhood dogs.
However, he doesn’t seem to have lost his energy. He’s been chasing his tail and looking for birds and neighbors to bark at. Nor has he lost his appetite. He’s been on carpet patrol
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tags: the puppy, Pug, dog, photo blogging, Kennel Cough, quarantine, flickr
May 15th, 2007
Yesterday, I was driving down Forest in the right lane and right as I came to The Bike Shop there were about 20 or 30 folks on bikes out front on the lawn. They chose to enter traffic right in front of me at that particular moment and they didn’t seem to be paying attention to oncoming traffic. I generally have no problem with bicyclists as long as they seem to be competent and following the law themselves.
I slammed on my brakes to avoid hitting those guys you
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tags: bicyclists, road hazards, driving, reckless, dangerous, camera, Canon Photoshot S3 IS, photo blogging, flickr
May 11th, 2007
My mother thought a good idea for a Mother’s Day present for my grandmother would be a framed photo of myself with Pugly, but she said that the photos I’ve taken of myself with the wigs on are all so fun that I should do the portrait with a wig on. O.K. No problem. In New Orleans, I used to do the costume wigs and costume stuff all of the time.
O.K. This is Maine. Definitely not the same as New Orleans.
And rural Maine? You cannot go out of your front door wearing a blue page wig, a Indian-made blouse, and blue jeans and carrying a tripod, a camera and a Pug and not have every single one of your neighbors come to the edge of your yard and stare like you’re about to climb up a water tower with a rifle or something.
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tags: Pug, dog, the puppy, neighbors, dress up, New Orleans, rural, Maine, Mother\\\'s Day, family
May 11th, 2007
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
– Isaac Asimov
tags: Quote of the Day
May 11th, 2007
I’m still unclear why they were walking away from the store with the empty basket.
tags: photo blogging, shopping cart
May 10th, 2007
I’ve decided to splurge. Like a really big splurge. Not like “Hmmm, it’s Friday; I think I’ll have some sushi” but like “I really am frustrated with this rinky-dink camera and I want to take better photos” splurge.
At first I thought I was desperate for a DSLR camera. You know, with all of the different, really expensive lenses and equipment? For months, I’ve been drooling over those professional-type cameras and their complexities and the brilliant photography I could do with them.
After the suffering I’ve done with my Canon Powershot SD110 and it’s measly 3MP and 2X optical zoom, just imagine how brilliant I could be!
Now, let’s assume that I have $800 to $1,000 to just through at the initial investment of a Canon Rebel XTi and one lens (probably a 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6), the zoom isn’t any better than what I have now, though I’d get 8 or 10MP. I’d still have to acquire another lens for better zoom and extra lenses cost about the same as the camera if not way more.
Talk about an expensive investment!
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tags: Canon, Canon Powershot, camera
May 8th, 2007
“Red meat is NOT bad for you. Now blue-green meat, THAT’S bad for you!”
– Tommy Smothers
tags: none
May 8th, 2007
Some days I’m really glad the doctors told me not to eat red meat.
The Maine Department of Agriculture says a Greene company is voluntarily recalling nearly a ton of beef. Bubier Farms says nearly 2,000 pounds of beef may be contaminated with fecal matter, a common source of E-Coli bacteria.
State officials say 1,936 pounds of beef may be contaminated with fecal material, as well as other contaminants. The problem was discovered by a federal inspector earlier this week. Officials say the inspector found fecal matter and hair on slabs of beef inside a cooler at Bubier Meats.
Bubier meats is a
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tags: beef, red meat, food contamination e. coli, Bubier Farms, Maine Department of Agriculture, Maine
May 7th, 2007
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
–Samuel Johnson
tags: Quote of the Day
May 7th, 2007
I had a bit of a scare this morning. Pugly and I headed off to the garage to load up the Jeep and drive off to daycare and work when the most upsetting weirdness occurred.
At first I thought Pugly was just being his playful self and was going to make me chase him when he wouldn’t get in the car, but soon it was quite evident that Pugly wasn’t being playful at all. There was no wag of the tail, no silly, bounciness
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tags: Pug, the puppy, temporary amnesia
May 4th, 2007
“Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that’s not true. Some smaller countries are neutral.”
– Robert Orben
tags: none
May 3rd, 2007
I was looking back over the Project 365 photos I’ve taken so far. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve contributed 122 photos to my Project 365 project out of the 470 photos I’ve uploaded to flickr, which has been a subset of the photos I’ve taken — only the best photos or only the ones I considered not the most horrible in the world.
Looking back over a quarter of a year in photos, I was sort of surprised at the memories they triggered. Granted, I’ve added little mini-blogs with a lot of them. For instance, I knew we had a late Winter here, but now I know we had our first real storm of 2007 starting January 14th. And the day I came down with the Norovirus, I took a photo of a license plate — PEPRONI. I have a photo of the first flower to bloom in my garden even though it’s already disappeared. I have photos of 122 moments that might have otherwise slipped away.
And I’ve had fun doing it.
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tags: Project 365, flickr, photo blogging
May 3rd, 2007
O.K. So apparently I was kind of wrong. That kid with the corner market on mowing the neighborhood lawns still lives in my new neighborhood. He’s about my age now and has a cute little girl and a Pug named Bruno.
He also has a riding lawnmower and for $25 a mow, he’ll mow your lawn and every other mow, he’ll weedwhack — by the way, spellcheck doesn’t like the word “weedwhack. His little girl rides up on top of the lawnmower with him, which is probably one of the cutest selling points. I think
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tags: grass, garden, lawnmower, yard work
May 2nd, 2007
According to Flickr’s mysterious “interestingness” formula, this is my 75th most interesting photo today:
“Dare You To Try To Take This Chair”
(Click on image to see a larger view.)
tags: none
May 2nd, 2007
“It’s no longer a question of staying healthy. It’s a question of finding a sickness you like.”
–Jackie Mason
tags: none
