Julie Barrett's Blog

What is the oldest thing in your house or apartment?

I think that these pieces of cloth certainly qualify because I know their provenance:


The white cloths date to the Civil War era. The other is a baby bonnet that dates to at least the turn of the previous century (ca. 1900).

However, this may be the oldest thing:


It's purported to be a page from an early King James Bible. That's Job 33-34. Now I've held an actual King James Bible in my hands. The museum I worked with a long time ago had a genu...

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After many hours of wailing and gnashing of teeth, the newi(ish) home page is ready. Pardon the virtual dust over the last couple of days.

So, what's new? The basic layout is very much the same, although I've been tweaking several design elements. Most of what you don't see is "under the hood" changes to make the page render almost entirely with CSS elements and stylesheets. I hope this will work in all browsers.

And the cats? Ah, yes. The home page now features two categories of random pictur...

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Apologies for the cryptic, emo tweets. Something happened that pissed me off royally. For my FenCon friends, it has absolutely nothing to do with you. It's something else. I should have kept my cool, but I didn't. For that, my friends, I apologize. I didn't mean to take it out on you.

I need to stop being a doormat for certain people, is all. It's hard for me to change, and it's equally difficult for them to change, but if I don't take charge of this aspect of my life I'll be miserable.

So I'm ...

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...and it almost works!

Our county is one of several the state of Texas is using for a pilot program.  The gist of the idea is that a county resident can vote anywhere in the county. Now give this a little thought. Normally you have to vote in your precinct to be sure you're voting for the right elections. Our city spans two US Congressional districts, and multiple Texas Congressional districts. The county encompasses several municipalities - which may or may not be holding elections for vario...

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I got sick of looking at the cluttered layout and decided to do something about it.

I hope I haven't gone too minimalist. There's always a danger of that.

If you're reading this in the archive or in the low-res version, you won't see the changes...yet. And of course, you won't see them from an RSS reader, Facebook, or other places the blog gets pushed. In that case, click here to go back to the main journal page.

All the blog bling is now in a pop-up box. Click the link on the right side of ...

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Fiddling around with some admin stuff.

Move along, there's nothing to see here.

Seriously.

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Again, I am watching all of the comments regarding the school boundary discussion on the east side of Plano. Some of the comments show a distinct lack of knowledge about this neighborhood. Here are just a couple of the misconceptions:

They're all Mexican and they get the paper in Spanish.

Hey, we have some good Mexican restaurants here. And some of 'em are darned nice. Take a look at this shot outside of Aparicio's:



While there is a large Hispanic population here, we don't all speak Spanish. An...

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Sooner or later, everyone buys, is given or otherwise acquires something that just doesn't work as expected. Tell us about that useless, broken, fraudulent, glitchy, disappointing acquisition.

It seems that last Christmas nothing I bought for Paul worked as advertised. The one cool gift I thought he'd really love was one of those virtual keyboards that projects a laser display on the desktop. It didn't work with any Bluetooth stack (software) he had, as I recall. It went back. (And there's the...

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Oh, this isn't the post I'm supposed to be working on. And while it appears to be a fluffy topic, it's also a sore spot.

Ladies, look in your handbag. What do you see there? If you're a working woman or a parent, chances are what you don't immediately see is the crap stuck down in the bottom - an extra pen, an inhaler for you or the kid, an extra car key, a toy, something for that sinus headache. And that's not even mentioning the important stuff - checkbook, wallet, a cell phone, a camera per...

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Found this cicada husk clinging to a tree in the yard:



I'm brewing up another post, but am not sure I'll get around to publishing it before the day is out. If I'm not back, have a good weekend. If I do come back, well you can still have a good weekend. I'm just generous that way. ;-)

Tags: Pictures

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