Energies of Creation » Creative Blogging

Seven Strange But True Things You Might Not Suspect

Lexi Sundell — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 03:41:48 +0000

Maria over at Never The Same River Twice tagged me for this meme, Seven Strange But True Things About Me. You should go check out her toe writing. We all need to ask for more details.

Otherwise this meme seems pretty self explanatory so here goes.

I often have hiked in the dark without a flashlight across the desert with cacti, rattlesnakes, and no trail.
I waded through snowdrifts two days ago carrying mulch into the hoop house, which at least is consistent with the time I shoveled snow off the flowerbeds to plant bulbs.
I kept a ladder on the front porch so I could quickly climb on the roof to photograph cloud formations I liked.
If I feel like painting flowers at 2 a.m., I do.
I used to frequently be within three feet of a wild whip-por-will when it sang, a luminous experience indeed.
I am skilled at burning cars. Ask me about it.
I married another artist so I feel completely normal at home. He, bless his heart, really could not think of anything strange about me.

Well, if you read the comments you can see I have been busted by someone who knows me well, Gia had to go and spill the beans! I feel obliged to add an 8th strange thing, but will confess it was something I had really gotten used to having in the house.

8. I built an upside down staircase in the ceiling of the stairwell to the basement to surprise my husband when he was away on a trip. Looking up you see the stairs and a small landing with an upside down table that has an upside down lamp bolted to it, as well as an upside down painting on the wall. I think it looks great! My husband was totally surprised, I might add.

In the great spirit of this meme I tag the following people.

Gia Combs-Ramirez
Patricia (she has no blog but can post in the comments here)
C.G. Walters
And anyone else who wants to join the fun!

Blog Cleanup Time

Lexi Sundell — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:16:12 +0000

Give me a paintbrush and I can do about anything, but crawl around inside WordPress and tinker? Yikes!

But that is what I had to do yesterday. This blog is on a manually installed version of WordPress and I did not do the installation. It was long overdue for upgrading to the latest version but I had been putting it off.

It was easy to postpone because of my hectic schedule, but it was really because the project intimidated me. This was unfortunately preventing me from installing a new theme to replace one that has been greatly annoying me with its deficiencies and malfunctions.

The new theme I had chosen, zigzag3 by Sadish, would not work on my older WordPress installation. I really love his themes and use them on my other blogs. They are feature rich, very clean, seo friendly, and they actually work like they are supposed to do.

The last straw came when I discovered for some unknown reason all my Paypal buttons and links had somehow redirected to my rss feed! They refused to behave at all. I finally bit the bullet and manually deleted the bulk of my WordPress installation at my webhost.

You can imagine my relief when the new installation actually worked.

I checked and my Paypal links were still berserk. I briefly switched to the WordPress default theme and they worked.

I then rolled up my sleeves and modified the wonderful zigzag3 theme to use my header and colors. Then I installed it. I gleefully deleted the old theme so it will never be seen again on this blog.

Once everything was working I was on a roll. I did a major cleanup on the blog. I hope you like the new presentation and find it more usable.

Now I want some hot chocolate.

Computer Detour From Blogging and Life

Lexi Sundell — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 14:56:38 +0000

Some detours in life are not exactly welcome. I have spent most of the past few days in computer purgatory with both of my computers. My desktop machine is custom built for graphics, which I use a lot for our gallery, but I also have a fairly decent laptop for a backup.

Both machines decided to give me grief right when my tech guy is gone for a month. How dare he have a life anyway? Ha! I was trying to muddle through until his return, but that became impossible.

I ended up on the phone with a different tech person who taught me how to solve a lot of the most immediate software problems. My anti-spyware defenses apparently have recently become outmoded, so now I have a whole new battery of programs to wage war on the nasties. My desktop has quit shutting off at random and unwanted intervals, so that is a welcome improvement.

However, it also has hardware problems. I am not sure how many yet, we are starting with the cheap ones like the power supply first. The power supply is intermittently making the noises of bearings going bad so it is a prime first suspect.

Just to make matters worse, my main backup external hard drive also decided to take a dive this week. Foolish me for buying a Maxtor. I have been trying to retrieve 180 gb of data from it in the midst of everything else.

Fortunately I am truly paranoid about backups, so I have small mountains of cds and dvds, which is problematical because they require a lot of hunting to find a particular file. But pretty much everything is in there somewhere, probably at least twice.

I infinitely prefer my external hard drives because they are so much more convenient for large amounts of data. Of course, that means they are more efficient at losing large amounts of date in a hurry…

Weeks like this make writing with sticks in sand look good. The next wave wipes them out so the messages cannot be read, but perhaps that is not too dissimilar to the internet after all.

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Blog Apocalypse Now

Lexi Sundell — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:57:25 +0000

In an amazing turn of events I am delighted to announce that my latest painting catapulted me into a wholly different mode of conscious non-physical communication. Outwardly appearing to be a poppy painting, this work carries an energy which ignites the same transformation in all who view it.

The current Blogosphere has been wonderful but due to the accelerating evolution and powerful creativity of all participants, we are now ready to launch the next phase of this great adventure. I am posting the image of this transformative painting so you can all join us in creating the new form. This will be my last post on the now outmoded method…

R-I-I-N-N-G R-I-I-N-N-G

Huh? Shut off the infernal alarm clock, umph. What happened here anyway? I was dreaming? Dreaming of creative energies transcending the Blogosphere?

Well, not today anyway. Looks like the Blogosphere is still the place to be.

Now the secret reason for this post, it is actually for Albert Foong’s Blog Apocalypse meme. He will donate $500 to charity if enough of us participate in the Blog Apocalypse meme. The idea is to write the very last post for your blog before the (sound a drumroll here) ending of the Blogosphere, then link to the Blog Apocalypse post on Albert’s blog, and link to whoever tagged you to join. He donates a dollar to charity for each submitting link.

I am tagging Gia Combs-Ramirez, Anmol Mehta, Anmol Mehta, Happy Rant, and anyone else reading this who wants to join the fun!

A quick note here, JoLynn at The Fit Shack also tagged me!

This post is included in the Carnival of Miracles, and you might want to go check out the other articles in this carnival for some good reading.

Struggling Bumbling Newbies

Lexi Sundell — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 15:44:17 +0000

When I saw the blog carnival title, “Carnival of Struggling Bumbling Newbies” I knew I had found my natural home. I have gone through great upheaval launching my embryonic blog due to a serious lack of knowledge of PHP and MySql, among a long list of other things.

Have any of you read the recent research indicating that ongoing learning invigorates the brain and is a factor in longevity? By those standards I estimate I added 30 years to my probable life expectancy in the first few days of trying to get my blog working.

The first issue was selecting a blogging platform. WordPress intimidated me because of the necessity of tinkering under the hood, yet it also has a large body of people who do know how to work with it. It looked best suited for my purposes if I could survive launching it.

Reading through the 5 minute install instructions convinced me I had 2 years of learning ahead before I could understand the instructions. Luckily for me, a nice young man in Australia installed it for me on a domain I had ready on my web host.

I had discovered the necessity of “pretty permalinks” so I attempted to activate them. It is quite alarming to vaporize your blog in a cloud of Page Not Found errors. No matter how I tried, that was the result every time.

This led to the discovery my web host had Windows servers and WordPress is written for Apache servers. I explored various workarounds, but they were so far over my head I abandoned the effort. I still have no idea what IIS is, but I do know it is allergic to permalinks in WordPress.

The next step was to move my blog to another host who uses Apache servers. This was a massively trying ordeal, but I got it done. With great trepidation I then attempted to set up my permalinks, and to my astonishment, they worked perfectly!

I then plunged into the arcane world of themes and installing them. Worse yet, I also needed to learn to modify them to use my nice header I had designed for my blog. There are a lot of ways to modify a theme that do extremely strange things. I found many of them.

During the course of all this, I told my husband I was excited to write a blog about my assorted explorations of art, gardening, and energy work. These are deeply interwoven facets of my creative life.

He promptly announced I should do a blog about fly fishing instead. (Does this give you a clue about his passion in life?) I told him I did not have time to do everything but blogging about fly fishing and his fly fishing paintings was a good idea. If he wrote it I would put it on the internet for him.

I made that offer because my husband dislikes almost everything electronic. He was setting a digital watch once and it wandered off into the twilight zone. Everything he did made it worse. He eventually solved the problem by throwing it in the wood stove.

So I tried out the Fantastico one button install to create his new blog, Brown Trout Delight. To my relief, it worked easily. I began to think doing two blogs when I really did not know how to do one effectively would not get a lot worse than what I was already doing.

It actually isn’t, as long as I quickly go do something on the second blog when I figure out how to do it on the first blog. Otherwise I am in danger of forgetting how I did it and have to reinvent that particular wheel.

To date I have managed to get themes installed, set up permalinks, installed the Sidebar Widgets plugin, set up Feedburner, and learned how to put a little banner on a sidebar. I also customized my theme. Now I think it is time to just get busy and write, which, as I recall, was the whole idea in the first place.