'tis the season for raynaud's disease

I have this thing called Raynaud's Disease that makes my fingers and toes turn yellow in the cold. Had my first major attack of the season today, walking to my car after work (a 15-minute jaunt in the crisp fall air). Here's a picture of my left hand after I got home. The hand is wet because I was warming it under some lukewarm running water before I got the brilliant idea to photograph it.

Basically, whatever controls the constriction of blood vessels to my hands and feet is @$&)ed up. The pallor seen in three of my fingers is where the vessels have constricted so much that blood is no longer getting through. Nice. Hurts like hell, too. Just saying.

I have to be careful to bundle up most of the time, or else winter becomes my own private hell. Summertime in the freezer aisle of the grocery store is not so lovely, either.

(I have since chewed off that hangnail on my ring finger, making a bloody mess, BTW. Also nice. Sorry.)

tumblr and whrrl

Apparently the new social media are not allowed access to sufficient vowels when choosing their names. Not quite sure why old people like me should put up with this this should be. Anyhow, I saw a blog on Tumblr a couple of weeks ago and got the bright idea to start my own Tumblog. Or whatever they call it. The time-wasting black hole endeavor kind of engaged me for a few days, but basically the only thing that's on my Tumblog now is a bunch of my imported Twitter tweets. Which begs the question: Why not just use Twitter?

I thought the Tumblr blog looked cool, for sure. Very minimalist, very clean. Plus I liked the fact that I could upload photos from my mobile device, which I HAVEN'T QUITE FIGURED OUT HOW TO DO YET ON BLOGGER. Not that I'm bitter bitter, or anything.

Then I saw a photo story on Whrrl. Which also seemed very cool. Except after I created a Whrrl account, I could not FOR THE LIFE OF ME figure out how to create an actual photo story. It was one of those "just kill me now" scenarios. Kept clicking on the various hyperlinks on my "home" page, and kept NOT FINDING THE INFORMATION I WANTED. And their "help" page was no help at all. You can't even delete your account all by yourself - you have to WRITE THEM AN E-MAIL and ask if they'll be so good as to delete your account for you. Whatever.

Hence I am blogging a lot more on Blogger again. Which is as it should be. Except for the f*cking nagging mobile uploads issue.

My Tumblr feed
My Twitter feed

A few hours after I posted the above rant, a lovely (I'm extrapolating here) woman named Heather Meeker - the Director of Corporate and Marketing Communications at Pelago (the makes of Whrrl) - sent me a very helpful e-mail:

Hi Michelle,

I just read your blog post about frustrations with Tumblr and our service, Whrrl. I found you via your tweet (@emelgy Aimless kvetching about Tumblr and Whrrl: http://tinyurl.com/dd3gw6) and hope you don’t mind me reaching out to you.

I wanted to apologize that your experience with Whrrl has been less than fantastic. You are right - at this time, you are not able to start a story from the Whrrl.com website. However, you can start a story through our iPhone application or via any phone with SMS text capabilities. If you’re interested to learn how, I’d be happy to walk you through it.

Here’s the good news - we are working to enable anyone to start a story from the Web. That feature is coming soon, and we’ll be sure to tweet and blog about it, once it’s completed.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Again, sorry to hear your about your experience with Whrrl.

Best,

Heather

OMG! I don't know why I am continually surprised to discover that people actually READ my blog posts. In this case, I felt compelled to send Ms. Meeker an even lovelier response:

Heather,

Thanks for your e-mail. Good to know that there are real people out there to take care of your Whrrlers. Too bad the same can't be said about Twitter - I have submitted help tickets to them several times, and have never once heard back from a real person. Whrrl wins the service game this time around.

I appreciate your offer to help me learn to use Whrrl from my mobile device, but (being that I am living in Canada, with a dubious mobile service provider) I suspect that the whole mobile uploading thing would be a bit of a challenge for me, and possibly beyond Whrrl's technical support skills. Once you begin to offer the web service thingy, I may revisit the whole Whrrl thingy.

Until then, cheers and good luck with your other customers. I'll be posting your offer of aid as an addendum to my blog post, so that people will know what nice guys you are over there at Whrrl. Er, Pelago.

Best,

MLG

So there you have it. My work here is done.

i killed my basting brush

For everyone who wants to know what I did to my basting brush (an explanation assembled from a number of tweets on Twitter):

I have a cast iron frying pan. Old-fashioned things appeal to me. Plus it adds iron to my food, and heaven knows I need iron.

What with all the blood I lose every month.

The thing about cast iron frying pans is, things tend to stick to them. (In this particular equation, "things" = "food.")

And to prevent "things" from sticking to cast iron pans, you need to occasionally "season" them.

And to "season" cast iron pans, you basically need to burn oil in them. Until the burnt oil creates a coating that keeps food from sticking.

In theory, if not in practice.

Mom, you'll be happy to know that my smoke alarm is still working.