ACK!! I spent a great deal of time fooling around with Quicktime to edit this to a short three seconds of Syndey . . . and then WordPress wouldn’t upload it – said it was too big. So I went over to YouTube and uploaded the shortened version and here it is in all its blurring around and waving glory. RATS, Quicktime, what did I do wrong.?

On May 5th, I thought, “Gee, I haven’t featured any of many bears we named eight years ago.” No, actually, I did not think that concisely. I believe I stumbled on this blue bear, wondered if her were named, flipped him over to look at his butt . . . and saw his label: Sadistic Blue. Then I thought, “Aha, I’ve been lax and now I can catch up a little on bear butt listing.” Well, I thought something like that.

So I photographed his face which inspired his name and his butt with the label and posted the pictures.

Later I went to the store and got dye to cover the gray in my hair. We left it on and I think it is too dark . . . and shows the classic red flashes of “I colored my hair and goofed up syndrome.” So now I am more aware of it – and more aware of it’s limpness, thinness and very skinny (what they call ‘fine’ ) texture.

Yesterday was a bummer on many levels and on top of it – sort of literally – hung my limp hair.

I happened to spy Sadistic Blue sometime in the afternoon – and I wonder if showing his butt photo had been a grave error. Maybe he had a hand in the coloring being less than optimal. Can you piss off a stuffed bear?

Oh, rats, I did not know he was reading over my shoulder.

“STUFFED!!!” he yelled and gave my hair a jerk. I think I need to be careful today.

The picture below in from Instapundit, Glenn Reynold’s blog, and shows some cows near Dayton, Tennessee. We are looking to see how many, if any, are leaning. And if one is, leaning that is . . . then who stole our cow? Or is a new fashion trend?

Back to the time when we named bears – and labelled them:

As I type, a concocted gel-like substance that started out green is working on my hair to color the gray and make me look younger and beautiful and so attractive you can’t believe it. Well . . . as Ronald Reagan was known to drawl, that may not turn out to be the case. Right now we’re hoping my hair won’t remain green.

My scalp is actually tingling. Oh, well. Summer insisted that I get light golden brown; I think if I am going to do this, I should have a new and thrilling color. Or what about those ladies who have a shock of white running through their hair.

Now Summer is filming me with a camcorder – the cassette type. We are going to see if we can find a cable that will allow me to transfer the “movie” from VCR to the computer and then, look out world, on to YouTube and mega views as America goes wild over AmeliaJake.

UPDATE UPDATE  UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

The timer got goofed up and we think the stuff was on my hair way too long. I am not looking in the mirror. Maybe tomorrow I will go to the store (wearing a hat, of course) and get a nice red color. Let’s not panic; I am an older woman, after all. It can’t be the end of the world.

But if I die tonight and my mother insists that I be buried and not cremated, please, please somebody do something about my hair.

Summer and I mowed the front yard – we don’t really have a lawn, but there doesn’t seem to be a word “yardmowing” . . . not that that has stopped me before. We picked up sticks and she mowed and then I mowed and then she mowed and then I mowed. When we were in the non-mowing phase, we pulled and cut little Christmas lights off of the two huge bushes by the front door.

The Christmas light thing isn’t as bad as it seems; they wind all around the branches and the wind rearranges them and makes certain they are caught up on several branches at once. They freeze like that; they get iced over; they get buried in snow . . . and fortunately they blend in with the dense leafless sticks that make up our winter bushes. Usually, we cut them off much earlier than this, but for some reason we didn’t get around to it as soon this year . . . Perhaps because days of sun didn’t get around to us for a long time this year?

Whatever, they are down now, but as my husband says, “It is almost time to put them up again.” Well, not really, but before we get too far into winter. I know what it is like to stand out there in December with a bitter wind, low temperatures and sometimes snowflakes. Oh, it’s fun to laugh about it in memory mode, but while you are doing it, it can be brutal – especially if a string goes defective not before it is put up, but right after. Swearing during the Christmas season . . . tsk, tsk.

I have wandered a far piece from the mowing theme. Well, it was the first of the season . . . and we still have the back to do. I am thinking of the days when it will be HOT out there, and HUMID. Those are the times I imagine a bunch of people with lawnmowers lined up. They start their engines; they march across the yard side-by-side and finish it just that fast. They kind of look like that network group that shows up in one of the cellphone company commercials . . .

I guess there are a group of people called Mommy Bloggers who are affiliated with an ad group called Blogher. I am very sketchy about this, but stumbled onto one of them in Boston a while back and occasionally check in to see what she is writing. She said she was awarding a “perfect post” to another blogger, Mrs. Chicken at Chicken and Cheese. So I read it and because Mrs. Chicken has a nickname for her daughter – The Poo, which connects us by coincidence of family nicknames – I read more.

Part of what I read was that this is her private writing space where she can make remarks about people, but she did mention one of those people had found her already so she had to change locations. Well, okay . . . except with my curiosity piqued and with only a few references in the blog, I soon knew all about it her.

Now, if I can do it so quickly, does she not think these folks who found her once before won’t be able to do the same thing again? I’m thinking, oh, the revealing web we weave when we when first we a blog do conceive.

Well, this showed up on YouTube from, I think, Coltskid18. I particularly like the arm out the window at the very end.

Last night I watched the segment of Dateline that addressed the murder of a young woman (Nona Dirksmeyer) in Arkansas and the progression of the legal case against her boyfriend and the eventual verdict of not guilty. I wanted to learn a little more so I went to the msnbc/dateline website and found a section that asked what your opinion of the verdict was. I agreed with the verdict and actually had my suspicions about the stepfather. I felt strongly enough about this to fill out the little registration comment section and leave my opinion.

When I clicked back to look at what others had said, I was amazed to see that almost everyone was suggesting that the stepfather did the “dunning” in this whodunit. Today I looked again and all 22 pages of comments pretty much said, “Yo, police, look at the stepdad and the mom.”

So what is going to come of this? Did the story show up on Dateline because someone wanted the court of public opinion to get an investigation moving? Maybe.

Here’s just one quirky tidbit: The stepdad decided to use the murdered girl’s cellphone, found by the body at the murder scene because, he says, “I am frugal.”

I woke up this morning to dark and gloomy overcast and the threat of rain. Now –  and I don’t know if it is a coincidence or not –  now the sun has come out just as Bill Clinton has come to town to speak. I hear birds chirping outside. Surely, this is not “a sign”  . . .

This sun thing shakes up my day though, for I had accepted that it was going to be too wet and whatever outside to do anything in the yard work category. I even went out and sawed a couple of branches so I could say, “Well, I did what I could.” Now, the blue sky and sun are calling my bluff and wanting me to go out there and do more??

Are there ferns  that like sun? I am thinking of having a fern lawn with little paths leading a few places. No mowing, just “ferning” – whatever that is. Then each winter the little ferns would turn brown and lean over and be covered with snow. In the spring they would put up their little space monster-like green ball heads on tiny necks and we’d have another go at summer.