I have been using sewing machines for 45+ years but I never really understood how they worked inside.  I could never grasp how the top thread and the bottom thread got locked together in the bobbin.

But as part of my recent research into sewing machines I stumbled across the coolest little graphic that makes the process perfectly clear. It is so satisfying to finally understand what is going on in there!

I think this is so neat:

Michelle is about to move and is not able to take him with and she was afraid that, because he is an older dog, he might not get adopted if he was at the pound.  So I took him in.

He is a beautiful little dog and you would never guess that he is older.  He is very frisky and affectionate.  He gets along well with Snickerdoodle and the cats and he seems to be fitting in pretty well in our little household.

Here is a picture of Gummi Bear with my son. (That is Spicy Sam behind them, knocking the pictures off the wall.)

However, they have a very specific, very ugly, very closed-minded policy about linking to posts on "conservative" websites. When A&LD links to an article on The National Review site or The American Spectator (for example) they always link to the print-formatted version of the article. They never do that with any of the obscenely liberal publications they link to.

Why does this make a difference? Because when a reader follows the A&LD link to the print-formatted article he does not see ANY of the rest of the target website including any of the design, links, other features, contributors, comments etc.

One of the main benefits of getting a link to your content is that your new readers will have a chance to check out your site and notice all your other content. You hope that your new readers will appreciate your site design and be drawn in to the display of your attractively presented material. Perhaps they will enjoy the comments enough to become part of the discussion themselves.

Arts & Letters Daily's practice of linking to unformatted, naked, zero-context, dead-end versions of conservative website content is a mean spirited and petty way to prevent their readers from making a connection with websites like The National Review and The American Spectator. (It also prevents the target site from earning ad revenue on the visit.)

I have been watching this go on for some time now and I am really sick of it.

Let me show you an example. Here is a National Review article as linked to by A&LD: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/253676

Here is the same article as it normally appears on the website and how it would normally be linked to: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/253676/needed-economics-grownups-interview

That's a pretty big difference, isn't it? And (as far as I have noticed) it only happens with conservative websites.

He was a very old dog that I had taken in as a stray.  He was starving and very sick when I found him on my front lawn but I nursed him back to health and he turned out to be a very sweet little guy.  He was extremely shy and quiet and afraid of just about everything.  He was blind in one eye and had very limited vision in the other and he was very tiny so I could certainly understand why was so timid.  He spent most of his time curled up asleep in his little bed in my office.

I am so glad I was able to give him a good home and a lot of love in the last years of his life.

I had also written about getting a beagle named Doodle and that he was getting along well with the cats… That did not work out either. His cat chasing escalated into cat biting so I had to take him back to the shelter. But while I was there I spotted a cute little mutt and brought him home as a replacement.

I named him Snickerdoodle because he has a brown brindle coat and he looks just like a little cinnamon snicker-doodle cookie. He seems to be mostly rat terrier. He is a very outdoors kind of dog and he is great on the leash. He loves the beach and hiking in the woods but his favorite thing is fetching tennis balls. He has a very short coat so I don't need to spend hours picking burrs out of it every time we come back inside. He is not aggressive with the other pets and everyone seems to be getting along fine now. Finally. Knock on wood.

Here is a picture of Snickerdoodle on the beach:

Also, I noticed that the whole site was offline for the last few days because I exceeded my bandwidth.  (That means that I had gotten more traffic than what I had paid my hosting company to accommodate.)  So I fixed that with my hosting company and now the site is back up.

I really will try to get everything updated soon.

Let me see if I can remember what was in it… A plastic snowman, an ugly canvas wine bag and a small yellow plastic car. I think that was it. Not even worth taking to St. Vincent de Paul. Never again, Woot!

…..

Yeah big deal. There is a Woot Off today.  So what.

The previous bag of crap was announced only through Twitter, making it a total time-waster.  The bag of crap before that was total crap.

Jerk somebody else off this time Woot.  You bore me.