Weirdness Abounds

Okay, this has been a truly weird weekend around the Bag Lady's ol' stump ranch. After her weird Saturday night experiments with her word processing package, she thought she would have a nice, quiet Sunday.......but no.

The first weird occurrence involved the Princess dog and a deer. The Bag Lady could hear the Princess barking, so she looked out the window to see a deer standing in the driveway. This is not at all unusual, but what was strange was that the deer was not leaving. In fact, as the Bag Lady watched, the deer pinned back her ears, advanced on the Princess and stomped her foot! The Bag Lady's mouth dropped open in disbelief! She has never seen that before! She tried to videotape it, but unfortunately, the angle of the sun was wrong and the deer was standing in the shade, so wasn't visible.

The Mexican stand-off went on for about half an hour, until the Bag Lady finally called her dog to the house. When the dog left, the deer walked a short distance into the trees and stood there. Out of curiosity, the Bag Lady went and searched around in the bush a little (the deer finally left when the Bag Lady got too close) but there was nothing to be seen. Deer don't usually start having babies until late April or May, but she may have had one early. If she did, and it was in the bush, it was very well hidden.

(This is the best shot the Bag Lady can manage - if you look very closely, you can see the deer has her ears laid back and one front foot in the air, about to stomp.)

The second weird occurrence happened Sunday afternoon. The Cowboy and the Bag Lady spent most of the day in the shop, putting together a new grass-seeder. When they finished and were walking from the shop to the house, the Bag Lady heard the roar of jet planes, so looked up. Lo and behold, there was what appeared to be a passenger jet being pursued by 6 fighter jets! The Bag Lady ran to the house for her camera, but the jets were traveling so fast that by the time she got back outside, they were almost out of sight. She snapped a picture of their contrails:

Approximately 15 or 20 minutes later, they heard jets again, so back outside they went. This time there were more contrails, but they were also traveling so fast, the jets themselves were out of sight. The Bag Lady took a picture again. Rather like taking a photo of the empty barn after the horse is gone...

(The funny white square in the picture is the Bag Lady's new high-speed internet receiver.)

The strange part of all this is that the Bag Lady lives far away from any military bases where there are jets stationed. And why would they be chasing a passenger jet, if that is, in fact, what they were doing? Weird.

The Bag Lady is hoping that her quota of weirdness is full now. She doesn't know how much more of this she can take! She should have known what kind of day it would be when she dropped a full 2-litre carton of milk on the floor as she was preparing her breakfast... of course it split open at the top! She was tempted to just throw her cereal there, too. If she was a better housekeeper and washed her floors more often, she just might have...

Weird Saturday Night

The Bag Lady has been playing around with her new word processing package and learning a few things about it. It is quite similar to what she used before, but of course there are some differences.

She has been playing around with highlighting to see if it would survive the transition to blogger.

She managed to turn it on and can't figure out how to make it stop now.

Stupid thing.

There, that seems to have done the trick. Whew.

The Bag Lady has been to many strange fonts and had many strange experiences, but she hopes things will return to normal soon. She may even have figured out the highlighting thing. The bullets have her stumped, though.

For some reason, this word processing package keeps wanting to put words in her mouth. Oh, she may have figured that out and made it stop. Whew. It was driving her crazy. She can do her own thinking, thankyouverymuch. (well, sometimes, anyway!)

This is a ridiculous post. Makes the Bag Lady look like an idiot. But she really just wanted to see if the highlighting and such would make the journey over to Blogger.

And yes, it is Saturday night. And no, she hasn't been drinking. (more's the pity). She will dig through her archives and find a nice picture for you, if you behave. At least then your visit here will not have been totally in vain. (to say nothing of bizarre).

Okay, it might still be bizarre. This is the photo of the Bag Lady's hair that Blogger refused to allow her to post when she was complaining about the Pippi Longstocking look.

Gosh. It doesn't look as bad as she thought at the time. From this angle, anyway! What do y'all think -- does the Bag Lady need a haircut?

Friday Round-up

Well now. The Bag Lady has had a fine time with her computer in the last little while. The high-speed connection was installed with very little trouble (the fellow who installed it had a wee problem getting the signal, until he went outside and moved his ladder from in front of the thingy he installed on her roof!)

Once the high-speed connection was installed and operational, the Bag Lady decided she needed to do a little tweaking. Some of you may recall that she had her computer decimated by the repair shop not that long ago, so she has been having all kinds of fun, downloading a word processing package, and switching over to Mozilla from what she was using previously. Of course, it would help her immensely if she had any freakin' idea what she was doing, but whatever. She has been sorting out her bookmarks and skipping around from blog to blog. Whoosh!

Oh, and for those of you who are obsessed with checking your stats, apparently the Bag Lady moved to Calgary when she got high-speed. She just wishes she could get a food delivery from a restaurant, now that she is supposedly living in the Big City. Bastards still won't deliver! They tell her they can't keep the food warm for the 9 hours it would take them to get it here. What's with that?

On the subject of stats, the Bag Lady is really looking forward to checking the map in sitemeter. She has never been able to do that before, and apparently needs to download something in order to do it, but she will get to that soon. She loves checking her stats. Remember when she posted about things setting off the music in her head? She has several readers in Houston, Texas, so every time she looks at her sitemeter, that song sticks in her head (Houston means that I'm one day closer to you...) Sh*t, just did it to myself again by telling you!

The Bag Lady is off to do some shopping today (even though the nearest city to her doesn't offer anything close to the choices that Calgary would!). She will have to tear herself away from all the fun she's having with her high-speed connection. She also hopes to be back to normal blogging next week. She writes her blog posts in her word-processing program, and has been without one since she got her computer back from the repair-shop-from-hell, so has had to curtail her customary spouting off. Be warned, regular programming will resume next week, so be prepared for spouting. Or at least; dribbling.

And, last but not least, the Bag Lady simply had to try downloading a photo to see how long it would take! This was taken a couple days ago of the Bag Lady's front lawn.

And it took about 20 seconds to load, instead of the 3 or 4 minutes she was accustomed to!!! Woohoo!!!

Have a great weekend!

Lady in Waiting

The Bag Lady is excited this morning. No, silly, not about that! Sheesh, get your mind out of the gutter!



She's excited because she is supposed to be getting high-speed internet installed today. She can hardly wait to not have to wait anymore. When you have a dial-up connection, you wait. For everything. You wait for it to connect, you wait for every page to load, you wait (mostly in vain!) for pictures to load, and you would spend your life waiting to watch some of the videos posted on some of the blogs.



The other day, the Bag Lady tried to watch a video of Mizfit(http://mizfitonline.com) doing some exercises. Those of you with a high-speed connection would just have clicked on the little control thing and the video would play, right? The Bag Lady clicked on the little control and waited. And waited. The video finally started to play. Mizfit moved her arm, said half a word and the video stopped. Then it loaded some more and the Bag Lady waited. And waited. Mizfit's arm moved another quarter of an inch, she said the rest of the word.....and the video stopped to load some more. Twenty minutes later, the Bag Lady finally left Mizfit hanging off her chair. No wonder Mizfit has such toned arms....in the Bag Lady's world, she is still hanging there!! One of the first things the Bag Lady is going to do when she has her high-speed connection hooked up is go and let Mizfit off that damned chair!!



Another place she is going is over to Hilary's blog, the Smitten Image (the link is in my sidebar). The Bag Lady really wants to see the pictures that Hilary has posted of the disaster zone her bedroom was turned into not too long ago. For those of you who haven't read Hilary's last few posts, scoot on over and see how she spent her Easter vacation!!



The Bag Lady can hardly wait to see how fast pictures will load onto her own blog with a high-speed connection. She has mentioned in previous posts about waiting for photos to load. She has negotiated peace treaties between small Balkan countries in the time it took to post a picture on her blog. She's wondering if the high-speed connection will allow her to get up and take the 7 steps to the coffee pot before her picture comes up. She won't have time to vacuum her living room while she waits, will she? On the other hand, she won't spend nearly as much time on the computer, because she will be able to scoot around from blog to blog without waiting for what seems like hours for each page to load! She might even be forced to find new blogs to look at so she can keep her butt planted in front of her computer...or worse yet, get off her ever-expanding butt and lose some of it!



Of course, if something goes wrong (as things sometimes do in her world), the Bag Lady will still be waiting. She'll be waiting for pages to load, or she'll be waiting for pictures to load, or she'll be waiting for the installer to show up. And poor Mizfit will still be hanging off her chair!



Let's all hope for everyone concerned that the installer shows up on time, everything goes smoothly and the Bag Lady will soon be speeding around the blogosphere. Woohoo!

Visitor Day

The Bag Lady had a visitor drop in yesterday morning. He was a little camera-shy, so she had trouble capturing him on film. He is almost impossible to spot in this first shot....

When she stepped out into the yard, he turned his back on her....

And, as she got a little closer, he turned and looked over his shoulder at her....

But when the Princess came tromping along to investigate what had caught the Bag Lady's attention, her guest took off. She had her camera at maximum telephoto, which still wasn't great, so in case you can't tell, he was a bald eagle. We see them quite often here in the winter, and this is the second time in recent years that one has perched in the trees behind the Bag Lady's house.

She spots them most often on the side of the road, feasting on some poor deer or moose that has been struck on the highway. One can always tell when there is a carcass somewhere because of the ravens and the eagles.

Trials of Being a Dog

What is it about things that smell exceptionally bad that makes dogs want to roll in it? Some primitive instinct that drives them to cover their own scent with whatever is available.

The Princess went out yesteday morning to "help" the Cowboy with the chores (she sits in the open gate to the pasture and guards it). When he finished and came into the house, he told the Bag Lady that her dog (why is it her dog when there's something wrong, and his the rest of the time?) got into something and needed to be washed.

The Bag Lady dutifully filled a bucket with warm soapy water and went out to wash "her" dog. Unfortunately, whatever the Princess found to roll in (smelled like some kind of urine) was exceptionally powerful, and wouldn't wash off easily. The Princess was banished from her castle to her deck in the hopes that once it dried, it wouldn't smell quite so bad.

You see, the Princess hates to be bathed. The Bag Lady takes her into the shower stall and uses the handheld shower nozzle on her. Once they are in the stall with the door shut, the Princess sits and suffers in silence, but getting her into the stall is an adventure. It generally takes both of the humans to manage this.

Yesterday, the Cowboy simply picked her up and carried her in. The Bag Lady bathed her and she suffered through it with only one little episode of howling when the Princess thought it was taking too long. Once done, the Bag Lady made the mistake of opening the shower door too soon and the Princess made her escape, still quite wet, and bee-lined directly for her favourite hiding spot underneath the large coffee table in the living room.



She refused to even look at the Bag Lady in order to have her picture taken, and stayed under the table for quite a long time. The Bag Lady finally coaxed her out with a rawhide treat and managed to finish drying her off.

She smells much better, and is extremely shiny and silky. That probably won't last long though.

Hippity Hoppity

The Bag Lady was busy yesterday, baking and decorating cakes for Easter. She got a little carried away, perhaps...

She is afraid her Easter bonnets are a little raggedy looking, but some days nothing goes right!

Tidbit from Bunnygirl's blog was the model for the bunny, although the Bag Lady may have failed to capture Tid's absolute cuteness!

(Oh and of course, they are carrot cakes!)

She is cooking Easter dinner for her step-daughter and her husband, because she and the Cowboy are going elsewhere tomorrow, and the kids have other obligations, too.

Happy Easter, everyone.