Asrai Devin's Blog, page 3

Star stalking and the death star canteen

First thing first. At least I’m not the only one who is obsessive. (Eddie Redmayne again) I made it to page 40 or so. I don`t know if I could live with the minutiae of my life being recorded, people constantly watching what I was doing. I pick my nose too much.

This is one of my favorite videos in the world. I first saw it on Smart  Bitches several years ago. Eddie Izzard, comedian, has a bit about the Death Star canteen illustrated with Lego stop motion video. (God I love stop motion, the amount of work one has to put in on those suckers).

Oh just watch it. NSFW- very strong language.

You need a tray, the food is HOT.

Tagged: Amusing, Asrai Devin, Death Star, death star canteen, Eddie Izzard, Eddie Redmayne, Lego, star stalking, Stop motion

Things I hate: blogger captchas

For everyone and anyone who blogs via Blogger platform and wonders why I don’t comment, it’s because Blogger hates me.

I’m trying to comment on a post as I type this. It’s an owned website which uses the Blogger (google owned) interface for their blog. I’m going to give up. I really want to leave this comment so I am persevering.

Earlier I tried on the same site and the captcha wasn’t working. Which is what is usually the problem.

Tonight the problem is my wordpress address. Apparently it cannot be verified.

Half the time I can’t read the image that google/Blogger provides me for the captcha so I’m guess. And when I am sure of it, it just tells me I’ve typed it in wrong.

Oh it finally worked, but it’s being held for approval. Which I think happened two or three times, but i missed it.

Blogger make your captchas REAL words so we can figure out what it is we are supposed to type out. Or anyone using blogger, change to WordPress, please. (Which, said, I still use blogger for my smut stuff, but I don’t expect much commenting).

 

** the blog post in question is this: http://www.thealphaparent.com/2012/11/the-laziness-conundrum.html

to which I need to reply this:

It is too easy and often pushed on tired new moms to just “give baby a bottle”. Uninformed doctors, nurses, partners, friends and family push the issue on struggling moms. I don’t think the blame is solely on the mom. (It amazes me how few people search out knowledge for any topic). The whole culture surrounding babies needs to change.

Sure the post is blunt and judgemental. Judgment and/or criticism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s like watching a friend make a bad choice repeatedly and staying silent or worse, supporting her choice to ram her life into a brick wall. Maybe she needs some blunt truth.

Maybe we don’t need to work so hard not to offend people. It is hard to take a hard stance

 

Tagged: abuse, Asrai Devin, Blog, CAPTCHA, Email address, Second Chance Romance, Website

Things I’m obsessed with: Positive Parenting

We have two children. Our daughter is ten, I’ll spare you a lot of details, because I don’t want to broadcast her life on the internet, telling things that not even she knows.

She’s a naturally passive child. She’s quiet and she likes to please us with her behavior. And she is hard on herself, negating the need for us to be hard on her a lot of the time. (There are cons to that trait as well. It takes a long time to be perfect).

Our son is 2. He is loud, he is boisterous and he is rough. He doesn’t stop. He’s funny. He throws tantrums and kicks and hits and screams. he is challenging and high needs, which I think most two year olds are.

anyway, early on I would get very frustrated with him. he would throw tantrums and I didn’t know what to do. My mom said “ignore the tantrums” but it was really hard to just walk away. I would try to cuddle him but i found myself getting frustrated and losing my cool. Yelling, a slap on the butt happened more than once.

I really didn’t like MY behavior in response to him being a toddler.

I don’t really know the exact chain that lead me to http://www.positive-parents.org/ which after a couple months led me to http://www.ahaparenting.com/ which is a website written by a Dr. Laura Markham, a clinical psychologist and parent.

Advice like: time outs don’t help to do much besides make your child feel bad and ignoring our natural empathy for our children. http://www.ahaparenting.com/parenting-tools/positive-discipline/timeouts

And that you don’t have to ignore tantrums. In fact, ignoring them doesn’t teach children to regulate their emotions or help calm themselves. Tantrums are an overflow of emotion, we all have them, cry fit or need to rant and rave are ways that adults throw tantrums (at the worst end of the spectrum we have people with assault or murder charges because they never learned self-control). Children need a parent to help calm them and then they can learn to calm themselves. http://www.ahaparenting.com/parenting-tools/positive-discipline/timeouts

That punishment and consequences are not necessary to teach a child to behave. I have had several arguments about this one. A good parent-child connection is the basis for everything on the site. And then you set a limit. When the child is younger, you just end the behavior. Hitting means we go home, or have a time in. (Dr. Markham explains it better in the link than I’m doing in summary). As the child grows, he can help solve the problem with you. http://www.ahaparenting.com/parenting-tools/positive-discipline/Consequences_Punishment

So I am totally crazy about the idea.

What do you think?

Tagged: Asrai Devin, Behavior, child, Clinical psychology, Family, imposed consequences, no need for consequences, Parent, positive parenting, Tantrum, tantrums

Blogging …

I know blogging about blogging how boring.

I was just thinking about my process. It’s probably not the best. And if I did better I might get more views. I often write these things up late at night. I’ll be surfing Pinterest or Twitter or my blog feed reader and get ideas. Usually I’ll schedule a bunch of stuff in advance and ignore my blog for the next two weeks.

Eh I’m not here because I’m trying to grow my blog. I like yelling into an echo chamber. My focus is on my fiction. I am not into niche blogging right now. I’d like to be but I don’t have time to read into one niche ’cause all my free time is fiction time.

Anyway, I write these blog posts late at night. And then I hit schedule and I really don’t look at them again. Occasionally I’ll check to see if the formatting is good and I do read comments. But I don’t reread my content.

Yeah …

I should probably save those things into a draft and read it over just once more before it goes live.

Tagged: Asrai Devin, Blog, Echo chamber, Facebook, niche blogging, Second Chance Romance, Social Networking, Twitter

Okay, I try not to be poltical

I mean on the blog I try not to be political. I’m Canadian so American politics are on my radar, what happens down there has effects on us. I have strong opinions, but this blog is not for me to talk about them. This is my fun place. My happy place.

But this video made me laugh hysterically. Someone took a lot of time to make this video.

oh there is an accompanying Obama one.

 

Tagged: Asrai Devin, Barack Obama, funny videos, Mitt Romney, parody, political parody, Politics, Second Chance Romance, United States

Dislike: early snow

I know when I was a kid (oh man, I’m old if I’m starting stories with this line), we had snow before Halloween frequently. Maybe not, it seemed like it was  normal happenstance. Of course, my memory may be faulty.

Anyway, this year I feel like we got screwed out of fall. I got about two days to rake leaves because it was either raining, or windy enough to carry Sunshine Boy away.

And then it happened…

it snowed.

It didn’t just snow. It snowed like 8 inches.

We went sledding on October 24th. And 25th. and 26th.

The highways were virtually untravellable for about three days after the snow started on Monday.

I know poor, poor pitiful me.

Anyway there are 30 bags of leaves under the snow in our yard. there won’t be as many next year because the power company is going to cut down one of our trees. (We have 6 giant trees and 4 smaller ones in our yard. Our yard is tiny).

So someone tell me they are having a lovely fall with lots of leaves and warmish air to enjoy them in. Here it’s white. Like rice.

Things I’m obessed with: I Found You by The Wanted

I know it’s pop. I know it’s a boy band. But I am in love with the song.

Alright confession. I love the video as well.

Totally hot when he kisses her and she’s totally into it and then he grabs the key, winks at her and takes off.

Also it makes me think of Gabriel, who is the hero of the book I am working on.

What can I say about Gabe? He’s self-assured, he’s sweet, he’s generous, but he has some moments of imperfection. He screwed it up with Shanna five years ago, and she’s not too willing to let him have a second try to break her heart.

I think if I watch this a few more times Nathan Sykes MAY invade my dreams. I’m attracted and repelled at the same time.

 

Tagged: Asrai Devin, Boy band, I Found You, Music, Second Chance Romance, Sweater, The Wanted

Cleaning up computer files

When I’m working on something I wind up with several files. One of the draft, one with some notes scribbled: like children’s names and ages,  a plot map (mostly done as I work or after I’ve written the entire draft) and sometimes a file with deleted scenes. I try to save them with either the working title or character’s names.

But then I never delete them.

Other things I never delete: short stories I started writing. Some of these are finished, but then I decided they were crap. Others I realize are crap while writing them and stop working on them. I have a dozen or more in my dropbox folder, at least four are fan fiction that I”m too embarrassed to share. (All Dragon Age related). Once in a while, there is nothing wrong with a premise I started to write, I just lost all interest.

I have numerous files with self-help, self-improvement and/or power of intention exercise answers in them. I read the burning question from Danielle LaPorte or something from Gabrielle Bernstein and I copy and past the question into a notepad, I answer it and then save it.

Like Done Fucking Deal. (Mine is a big check from Amazon, which I will celebrate by taking people out for dinner after I call my Mom).

I have this odd little montage I did a couple years ago, in the style of “Parenting Illustrated with Crappy Pictures” done in MS Paint. It’s about  how I don’t have to be perfect. I might still post that one.

For each of the five novels there are at least 3 saves each as I worked through various stages of edits. If I screwed up a round of editing really badly, I did not want to have to back to the pre-edited manuscript, but I didn’t want to save over that first draft either.

I have three different spreadsheets for various months for tracking sales on Amazon. I’ve never managed to update the spreadsheet for more than 3 consecutive days, so I gave up on that idea this last month.

I have three different spreadsheets for blog planning. (Also a few text notepad saves of various ideas that just didn’t work out in the end. Never mind the eighteen drafts I have saved in WordPress of ideas I later realized were stupid).

And that’s just the laptop which I’ve only had about two years. Never mind the desktop we’ve had for the last four years. Free pdfs from every self-improvement website in exchange for my well guarded email address. Duplicate photos of the kids. In case that last shot didn’t turn out. Every really bad cover image I made. And there were some bad ones.

I need to go through all this stuff and save what is important and delete what is not important. Back up the irreplaceable stuff, like photos. And delete everything else that I can bear to delete. (I am as much a digital packrat as I am in real life).

Do you keep your computer files organized in neat folders? or are they scattered and ill-named, leaving you hunting for things? Do you need to clean up your files?

Tagged: Asrai Devin, Computer file, computers, File Management, Hard disk drive, Microsoft Windows, Personal computer, USB flash drive, WordPress

Tales from trick or treating

Okay, too funny not to share.

Well not the first one.

We stopped at an elderly neighbours house and she was on the phone. She had tons of stacks of newspapers and other things  in her living room and was sitting in the middle. Totally reminded me of Hoarders, where the person has a path to their spot.

But what got me, was the stench of animal waste. I had not felt good all day and this nearly pushed me over the breaking point. Right in her doorway. She kept talking to me and the kids, and I grabbed my son (it was like -11 C and -15 or something with the windchill so we didn’t hit too many houses) and hightailed it out of there.

So we hit a couple other houses and my daughter kept aruging about outside lights being on vs just their inside lights. I told her a couple times that if the outside lights are not on, they weren’t doing candy. But some people, it was harder to tell. One house didn’t seem to have any lights, but thier kitchen was at the front porch and I could see people, so I figured they were open.

I am looking in the window and I see a guy running out of the room and down the hall. I SWEAR TO GOD, he was naked. And I’m stuttering a little, hoping Princess Sparkle was not looking in the window.

I looked back inside and caught the eye of the woman who shook her head at me. And then I had to look closer, becuase I thought she was nude as well. Turns out she had on a strapless tanktop.

Seriously people, invest in curtains if you are in the habit of going nude or even half-nude and if it’s Halloween. Even throw a sheet over that window. Man.

Shock me, shock me, with that deviant behavior

Okay you might have been a slacker in the 90′s if you know where that quote comes from.

There are so many great quotes and scenes from that movie it’s really hard to pick one for this Friday’s fun. So I won’t. Let’s see how many I can embed.

Oh the movie is Empire Records by the way. My friends and I used to watch it nearly once a week. I haven’t seen it in several years but I can damn near quote the whole thing still. It’s the perfect movie. You know in You’ve Got Mail, Tom Hanks tells Meg Ryan that The Godfather has all the answers to life. He was wrong, Empire Records does.

We’ve got philosophy:

We’ve got art interpretation, and some psychology:

Future planning and also police work and listening to your boss:

Corey shows us how to negotiate with your boss:

And last but not least (And I could go for much longer), work ethic. There are 8 employees, most of them teenagers, ALL of them except Mark, who may have eaten some special brownies, are in the back. Including the store manager Joe.

I  had five more I wanted to share, but they had nothing to do with morals they were just funny.

Okay last one. Some advertising and y’know DAMN THE MAN!

Tagged: Asrai Devin, dam the man, DAMN THE MAN, Empire Records, Ethan Embry, Film, gluing quarters, Godfather, Liv Tyler, Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks