I shot this rather pretty green hill as I was walking along North Road today (through a fence, I should add). If I had been able to reach the edge of the hill, I could have taken a photo of the detritus of the Trans Canadian oil pipeline expansion site: a huge and empty wooden spool, a few tarps covering mounds of soil, some small metal structures. The workers are gone now, and I don’t know if the site is going to be reclaimed or just left as is. I suspect the latter.
And while the grass looks pretty, here’s a Google Maps street view from 2017, the last year when the area was completely untouched by the pipeline construction:
It’s rather ironic that a buried pipeline required thousands of trees to be chopped down. And only grass is put back in their place. I suppose the view is nicer now without all the pesky trees blocking it.
The pipeline–a colossally expensive, stupid and unnecessary project that was about to be cancelled before the federal government swooped in to save it–is just about complete now, as the world transitions away from fossil fuels. If I think about the pipeline, it makes me angry. So I try not to think about it much.
That grass sure looks nice, though. You’d never know.
Celebrating a milestone with an important-looking title
On February 2, 2005 I wrote my first post here on creolened.com:
I was the last one to get bell bottom jeans in grade 5 and now I’m the last person on the Internet to have a blog.
Me, back when I had hair
Today, April 22, 2024, I am writing this, my 5,000th post, just in time for blogging to become a bit of a fad again.
5,000 posts seems like a lot. It is a lot, I suppose. It’s less impressive when you spread it out over the 19 years this blog has been around (263 per year). But it’s still a decent-sized number. If someone gave me $5,000 it would make my socks roll up and down a bit. If someone put 5,000 marbles in my bed, it would be very annoying to deal with. If the sea level rose 5,000 feet, I would be typing this on a boat and probably living in some real-life version of Waterworld.
You get the idea. 5,000 is a good number.
A single Fun Fact
Fun fact: In 2005 I wrote seven posts, in 2006 I wrote eight. My average has improved since then (this is post #159 for 2024).
I’m not going to offer words of wisdom or reflect on what the blog has meant to me, or anything like that. It’s an outlet for me. I like writing. I often have inane thoughts. A blog is a perfect place to put these thoughts down, because if you aren’t sharing your inane thoughts with the world, what are you going to do with them? Tell your cat? I don’t even have a cat any more (I did in 2005).
I will apologize for keeping the blog mired in design hell for so long. I really ought to spiff it up, slim it down, or something.
The inevitable list
What I will do, instead, is offer a list, because I like lists:
I recommend taking a look at the page Tags (all of them). I abuse the WordPress tags function horribly, which is why my blog has hundreds of them, but some of the weirder ones can yield entertaining and/or amusing, but also sometimes horrifying results.
I apologize for all the running posts. They’re not very interesting, except to me. But I did start adding pretty photos to them, at least.
The Creative category is where you’ll find my drawings and such. Some of them are not bad.
Writing Prompts is where I either write based on a prompt, or create my own lists of prompts (as established, I like lists). My prompts are almost exclusively absurd.
Check out my horrible attempt to take swimming lessons from 2009:
On Mastodon, Geoge Takei linked to a story about a Jeopardy answer (that is, question), that got the “real name” of Sideshow Bob wrong. Sideshow Bob, as any longtime fan of The Simpsons (now in its 800th season) knows, is the murderous sidekick of Krusty the Clown.
The incorrect question as it appeared on the show:
The inspiration for the character’s name, from the writers of the episode that revealed his real name:
All well and good so far. Jeopardy put in some u’s instead of o’s. But the site (comicsands.com, which is part of Takei’s media holdings) then went on to include this:
Good ol’ Krust the Clown1Takei got repeatedly dunked on Masotdon for this, in case you were wondering. I’ve used screenshots because the typo will likely be fixed in the future. The internet never forgets..
Anyway, this is a long way to go to point out a minor typo, but I gotta get the post count here up. Also, Krust the Clown just sounds funny.
Spring is starting out strong this year, as it is coinciding with the last bit of the unusually warm weather we’ve had over the last few days. It’ll be back to seasonal or seasonal-ish after that.
For now, though, it is pleasant and sunny and things are getting greener (in a good way).
It’s my annual post celebrating the arrival of Daylight Saving Time, which should totally be permanent but isn’t because politicians are dum-dums.
I will cherish that extra hour of light this evening by going out and revelling in the lightness of it all. Unless it’s raining, in which case I’ll be inside and hiding.
This is from the 10-day weather forecast. As I post this, it is March 9, 2024.
The normal high on these days, the last of which is the final day of Winter 2023/24, is 11C. As you can see, they are predicting a high up to 20C, which is almost double that and is legitimate t-shirt weather.
Even better: Only the first two days would establish new records, as we hit 20C on March 18 five years ago, in 2019.
Anyway, it will make for nice running weather if it happens. Unnerving, weird and unsettling, but nice.
