I’ve just post­ed the sec­ond episode of the Fibrant Liv­ing pod­cast, with much help from Sam.

Katie want­ed to go by Nease’s Needle­work a cou­ple of weeks ago, and you know I real­ly resist­ed fierce­ly 😉

While there, I saw a shop sam­ple of Drag­on Dreams’ Fairy Tale Sam­pler, and could not leave the shop with­out it. It’s get­ting most of my stitch­ing time now, because I just love it. Of course, the fact that it’s the first thing I’ve real­ly made espe­cial­ly for Sam makes it spe­cial, too. And what bet­ter to work on while gam­ing?

Have any of you vis­it­ed Reac­tive Col­ors yet, or tried out the soft­ware? It sounds very inter­est­ing. From Mind­Hacks:

Inno­v­a­tive autism com­mu­ni­ty soft­ware project Reac­tive Col­ors had its offi­cial launch the oth­er day, and is now sport­ing a new web­site and numer­ous ‘reac­tiv­i­ties’ to down­load and play online.

The project is designed to encour­age indi­vid­u­als with autis­tic spec­trum dif­fer­ences and learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties to use com­put­ers, through which they can devel­op mouse, key­board, pro­gram­ming and screen skills and delib­er­ate­ly empha­sise the char­ac­ter­is­tics of com­put­ing that are of poten­tial sig­nif­i­cance to peo­ple on the autism spec­trum.

The project is based on open-source prin­ci­ples and intend­ed to be more than just a free down­load. Inter­est­ed peo­ple are encour­aged to con­tribute their own pro­gram­ming skills to the project.

The input of peo­ple with autism and Asperg­er syn­drome is par­tic­u­lar­ly encour­aged, as they are like­ly to have the best insight into what sort of activ­i­ties will engage those on the autism spec­trum.

Today, a post to one of the home­school­ing lists I’m on includ­ed a link to Con­nec­tions: ezine of unschool­ing and mind­ful par­ent­ing. I haven’t read all of it, but there’s def­i­nite­ly lots of good stuff there. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed!

Namaste,
Cyn

Well, I tweaked this theme to make it “mine” but I’m not quite hap­py yet — we’re try­ing to remem­ber what fonts were used to make the head­er graph­ic years ago so we can re-do it while main­tain­ing some con­ti­nu­ity. And I think the Fibrant Liv­ing lay­out them is dis­tin­guish­able enough from The Beau­ty With­in* that I not­ed it as mod­i­fied (although I did­n’t rename it. Yet.)

I haven’t cus­tomized any­thing for Cyberstalked.org yet. I need to fix some minor bro­ken links from mov­ing that to a new domain (I did­n’t want it on my main one any more), but until I begin the process of real­ly build­ing the new blog on inter­net safe­ty my ener­gies are bet­ter used else­where.

There are sev­er­al obvi­ous things that I imme­di­ate­ly thought to search for in blog themes, though, and they just don’t exist as far as I can tell. So I think I may start play­ing around with Kubrick or one of its deriv­a­tives, or some­thing else eas­i­ly changed, to cre­ate some themes based on those ideas. Because, of course, I have so much free time 😉

*Use the theme switch­er on the low­er left-hand site at that site to choose The Beau­ty With­in from the list of avail­able themes.

You are cor­dial­ly invit­ed to vis­it the grand open­ing of Fibrant Liv­ing, the only pod­cast to focus on liv­ing a full, joy­ous life despite fibromyal­gia, chron­ic fatigue, or oth­er chron­ic ill­ness­es.

You can find Fibrant Liv­ing and its com­pan­ion blog at http://fibrantliving.com/ . The feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/FibrantLiving , or avail­able on LJ as fibrantliv­ing.

Fibrant Liv­ing is pro­duced by Sam Chupp of the Bear’s Grove, Drag­onKin and Bardic Cir­cle pod­casts.

Namaste,
Cyn

I know how to install Word­Press on our domains. Mua­ha­ha­ha!

Well, the arti­cles — all the arti­cles that made up the bulk of my old site — are com­ing back. I just need to update them.

One thing I always regret­ted was that there was­n’t an eas­i­er way for peo­ple to com­ment on those arti­cles, to dis­cuss or cri­tique them.

Well, that’s why you should reg­is­ter. I don’t have to approve your reg­is­tra­tion — in fact, I’m not involved at all. I just get an email say­ing you reg­is­tered. It’s strict­ly an anti­spam mea­sure that you’re required to do that and that I or Sam approves your first com­ment. That’s it. It isn’t like the Live­Jour­nal “friends” thing, so I don’t have to know you or any­thing like that.

Reg­is­ter and tell me what you think — about any­thing. A post, a par­tic­u­lar arti­cle, the lay­out of the site, what I’ve writ­ten about in the past, what you’d like to see me write about, what­ev­er. Inter­ac­tion is the entire rea­son for going to this for­mat!

Edit­ed 5/26: I’ve changed set­tings so that you can com­ment with­out reg­is­ter­ing, but you can reg­is­ter if you like.

So I actu­al­ly heard from some­one via Orkut. I can’t remem­ber if that’s ever hap­pened to me before or not.

Any­way, I went to check out this per­son­’s pro­file, and real­ized mine was way out of date. Some­day, I swear, I’m going to repro­duce all the ques­tions all those dif­fer­ent places ask right here on my own site, keep that up to date, and refuse to fill out any oth­er pro­files.

Any­way, one of the fields was “From my past rela­tion­ships I learned…” I found the ques­tion more inter­est­ing that most, so I’m repro­duc­ing my answer here, expand­ed a bit.
from my past rela­tion­ships i learned: Some­thing dif­fer­ent every time 🙂 A few of them:

Hon­esty is the only way to relate that’s worth both­er­ing with.
Love isn’t enough.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is price­less.

Rela­tion­ships take lots of work from every­one, and some­times they just aren’t sus­tain­able.

Sex is often the canary in the rela­tion­ship mine. Bar­ring health issues that make sex impos­si­ble or unlike­ly, a decrease in sex­u­al inti­ma­cy is usu­al­ly due to a decrease in over­all inti­ma­cy, which is Bad.

There’s no under­stand­ing crazy. Just walk away with as much of your san­i­ty intact as pos­si­ble.

Nobody deserves abuse.

Stay­ing togeth­er is sel­dom “best for the kids.” In fact, I’ve yet to see a sit­u­a­tion in which it was best for any­one.

There’s no way one (sane) per­son in a cou­ple or oth­er group­ing is hap­py if the oth­er is mis­er­able.

If some­one changes in a big way right after you get mar­ried, start try­ing to get an annul­ment. He isn’t the per­son you thought you knew.

While an adult can lie to you eas­i­ly, his kids can’t. Nei­ther can his pets. If either does­n’t behave con­sis­tent­ly with what she says, or she does­n’t treat them the way she says she believes in rais­ing kids or pets or what­ev­er, she’s a liar. Leave before you get any clos­er.

Some things are worth the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a bro­ken heart.

“If you real­ly loved me you’d…” means that the speak­er is an abu­sive ass­hole try­ing to get you to do some­thing that’s unhealthy for you.

Play­ing togeth­er is essen­tial. So is work­ing togeth­er.

Peo­ple are not projects.

Knights are noto­ri­ous for set­ting up new tow­ers with you inside them. The only safe “res­cue” is the DIY ver­sion, where you just walk out of the prison

What are yours?

And it was, tru­ly. Which is why this looks much the same as it did last night.

Katie and I drove all over metro Atlanta, test­ing out the new wheels in the process. A med­ical appoint­ment, a trip to the bank, the post office, our mail drop, a craft store, a school sup­ply place, a cou­ple of book stores, Phoenix & Drag­on, and some­thing I know that I’m for­get­ting.

You would­n’t believe how much “home­school­ing” gets done on the road. Had the deal­er had a van in stock with a DVD play­er installed, I could eas­i­ly have jus­ti­fied it for pure­ly edu­ca­tion­al pur­pos­es. As it is, I’m glad my lap­top has a DVD play­er, as we find var­i­ous BBC and PBS series pret­ty good sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als at times.

No AV mate­ri­als today, though — just books, paper, cal­cu­la­tor, and a lot of dis­cus­sion. Sci­ence, alge­bra, world his­to­ry, crit­i­cal think­ing, Eng­lish, vocab­u­lary, cur­rent events…

Oh! We got our Latin texts! Katie and I have decid­ed to start study­ing Latin togeth­er this sum­mer. I’ve always regret­ted not hav­ing had a chance to study it, and it can only help her. So here we go!

The girl got some knit­ting done in the car while we talked, too. As she gets more con­fi­dence in dri­ving, I look for­ward to get­ting some stitch­ing done while she dri­ves. On the oth­er hand, she’d get few­er lessons done. Hmmm.

I need to study to try to keep a lit­tle bit ahead of her. We’re going to have anoth­er blog where she, Sam and I post about our learn­ing adven­tures. It isn’t quite up yet, unfor­tu­nate­ly.

Namaste,

Cyn