I’m printing the pattern sheets for Sunday’s Bookmark Make-It/Take-It. A shout out to Becca for proofing it for me–thanks, Becca. (And by the way–she’s really good. She caught a couple of tiny things that many folks would never notice. I love that!) Which means, dear readers, she has the pattern! It pays to comment. Well, maybe. Now and then. It might. Or not.

Anywho, would you believe I’m still using the first printer I ever bought?! It’s true. An HP DeskJet 812C, purchased in 1998. Before this thing, I had a Canon StarWriter, which was a word processor–a step up from typewriters. I still have it and the disks which hold puzzles and stories from pre-1998.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about, or even admit.

Because I have to baby the printer a little, or a lot, I’m stuck at the desk doing things that can be interrupted every minute or so, like writing a rambling blog post, so I’ll catch you up on recent doings.

If you’ll look at the bottom of the sidebar, you’ll notice that I have now claimed this blog on Technorati. I’m really not sure what that does for me in a practical sense, but Tink thinks I should do it, so I did, albeit many months after she thought I should do it. I also “favorited” a bunch of the blogs that I read regularly. Not sure what that will do for me either, and no one in particular recommended it, but I did it nonetheless. So far, this blog isn’t anyone’s favorite.

Yep. That’s a croc! (from Kakadu NP, Australia)

You’ll also notice from the sidebar that I have committed to participate in NaNoWriMo 2007, which means I will attempt to write a 50,000-word novel during the 30 days of November. I did it last year and had a fan-vel-iffic time. I won, too! Which means I hit the 50,000 word mark. More about NaNoWriMo in a future post. It deserves one of its own. I’m merely recounting what I’ve done recently.

In connection with NaNoWriMo, I have downloaded AIM and have learned–with serious help and patience from the Fairbanks NaNo Municipal Liaison–how to access the Alaska Nano chat room. I’ve never been much of a chatter, but I hear there are writing challenges made there, and I love a good challenge, so I’ll give it a go.

And, finally, I have streamlined my blog-reading with Google Reader. I used to try to limit my blog reading according to how many links would fit on my browser toolbar. I was down to teeny-tiny abbreviations on the buttons so that I would have room for more. The Lazy Girl Designs blog was “lz.” inside number twenty was “20.” But that ultimately failed and I wound up with a little arrow alerting me that I’d over-stuffed my toolbar.

Of course, under the old system, I had to visit each blog to see if it had been updated. It went fast with the shortcuts, but that whole step is now gone. Now I go to Google Reader (through the shortcut on the now half-empty toolbar) and the updated sites are all right there. It’ll take some getting used to, but it will be more efficient in the end, and that’s reason enough to adapt.