Glittering Muse » Personal

What I am learning about my ageing parents from my 20 year old cat

Garnet David — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 04:10:36 +0000

I haven’t posted here in a long, long time. Most of my attention is now devoted to writing for my professional clarinet blog, The Buzzing Reed. DavidHThomas.net

Sometimes I just want to write something non-clarinet or music oriented.

My parents are miraculously still alive. My mother is 88, and my father is 83.

Each is declining in their own special way, with moments of breakthroughs mixed with the general trend toward the end of their lives.

I also have a cat named Punker, who is 20 in September. I cannot imagine him going. He has been with me for almost half my life. I raised him as a pre-weened kitten, only one week old. His mother died of toxemia because she had another baby inside her which did not birth.

I had to bottle feed Punker with a special kitten milk. I also had to rub his tummy (to simulate the mother licking him) to stimulate his urine to go, and eventually, to encourage a bowel movement!!

I don’t want to write the whole story now, because it’s midnight, and I need to eat (dinner) and go to bed. But I’ll post more about Punker’s wonderful life in the next few weeks.

David Thomas (aka Garnet)

Truth, Being, Spirit and Meaning

Garnet David — Wed, 19 May 2010 22:36:12 +0000

Some thoughts on Truth (reality), Possibility (change) and Being (consciousness).

Possibility (change) is what brings Being (consciousness) to Truth (reality). Possibility keeps open the door to new combinations and patterns within Truth.

Truth guides all possibilities to one present moment, the singularity of which branches out in all directions and encompasses All.

Truth is the track upon which Being unfolds. Possibility is the fuel of Being.

Being is the path Possibility alights along the tracks of Truth.

Truth is the grid, Possibility is the paint, or perhaps film. Being is the story.

The poetry of Being could be said to be its Spirit. The text, syntax and vocabulary of Being is formulated into meaning and beauty by each person. This interpretation and application of meaning and beauty raises humanity above mere existence. Spirit is meaning springing from Possibility.

My bizarre story about setting webmail browser as default mail sender

Garnet David — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:20:02 +0000

I have recently become frustrated by the default mailto: default settings on my PC, which always open Outlook Mail when I click on an email address to send to.

These days, almost everyone used web based mail programs, which are accessible from anywhere on any computer, rather than downloading messages to a desktop email program such as Thunderbird or Eudora, or Outlook Express.

But in the settings of my browsers, Firefox and IE, the settings for email programs didn’t include any web mail programs.

I researched the situation, and found that most browsers need a little script to tell them to go to a web based email handler.

I’ve used Yahoo Mail for awhile now, and I like it. But I have to pay to be able to access my other self hosted email accounts through pop mail. And recently, yahoo mail has been acting up, slow to load, slow to send. But I intended to stick with it.

So I researched how to make Yahoo Mail the default “mailto:” program. I found that Firefox needed the addon “greasemonkey” with a little script “mail to webmail”. And it came in one package in a new version of the browser with a Yahoo toolbar. So I downloaded and installed the new Firefox and enabled the webmailto feature. I was all set!

But when I tried a mailto link, it opened in GMAIL! Yes, it’s a web mail handler, but not Yahoo. I have a gmail account, but I never use it. I spent some time trying to direct the settings to Yahoo, and finally had to manually edit the script to set it to yahoo instead of gmail. How it came set to gmail I will never know, since it was advertised to go to Yahoo. Ahh, the mysteries of the Internet. I’m sure there’s an explanation, but that’s water under the bridge, or bytes and bytes down the wires.

While attempting to resolve the situation, however, I considered moving to Gmail. I went to my Gmail account and found that they also offer Pop mail access to my other addresses, but for FREE. It took me awhile, but I installed all my other emails (I have four others) on Gmail, and set up iGoogle as my home page, with a nice little addon to check my mail regularly right from my home page!

So, after all I went through to set mail to open Yahoo, now I wanted out! That opened up a whole new can of worms!

Now I couldn’t get rid of Yahoo, no matter what I tried. I deleted Yahoo Messanger, which came with the Firefox installation. I manually edited the greasemonkey script back to Gmail, to no avail. The main solution, adding a special script “Gmail Notifier” would have worked, except in Firefox, which I like best.

I was about to give up, at least for the day, and I did one more search for “how to make Gmail my default email program. It came up with two decent posts, one slightly confusing one from The Digital Wanderlust and About.com article which cleared up the problem. The About.com article shows clearly how to set Gmail as your default email program in Windows, Mac, and particularly in Firefox, where you have to do some funky stuff to get the little program into the browser.

The huge mystery of all this is: How bizarre that I had to manually add Gmail as a mailto choice after having trouble getting rid of it yesterday, when it seemingly installed itself in Firefox by seemingly “tagging along” with the new Firefox special “Yahoo” browser!

Welcome to the New URL of Glittering Muse!

Garnet David — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:25:57 +0000

Welcome to the new home of Glittering Muse.

Glittering Muse, just like its name, is now at http://GlitteringMuse.com. The old address (GlitteringSTEW.com/muse) will be deleted soon.

Please update your links to reflect the new one.

Happy New Year!

Garnet David — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:13:18 +0000

I just took a long shower and changed my bed sheets for the New Year, a tradition I began as a child to remind me of “turning over a new sheet” for the New Year.

Best Wishes for a Safe and Healthy New Year to All.

David Garnet