Happy Halloween!!

Some of the traditional practices of this multi-layered season have been made playful. We laugh in the face of death, wear costumes that play on our fears, and give away sweets to traveling bands of eager children, who threaten us with “tricks” unless we give them treats. Just under the surface of our playful pumpkins, costumes, parties and decorations, lies our biggest human anxiety: we die and so do those we love. Eventually, we will cross that veil into whatever it is that lies on the other side, —and what that is, we cannot know.

Check out the rest of Ministrare's post about Fall and ancestors. It is really lovely.

May you enjoy the beauty and breadth of Fall today; the bustling of costumed children, and the magic of adults playing dress-up. May the smell of hot apple cider and pumpkin spices cross your path, and may the nearness of death make you take a deep spicy breath full of life.

Another Annoying Quiz Result

This is an interesting test. It says my mind and spirit are doing remarkably well considering my dismal social life. I think it was a pretty good quiz, except I think they used my small family against me, because I would rate my family life higher. The romantic love section is sadly accurate, even optimistic. The finance and body are also about right. I'm going to give my friends and family section a hardy 7, for lots of love with room for improvement, and up my overall score to a 7. (Come on finance and love!!)

Via: It's all one thing.

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	5.8
Mind:	7.3
Body:	5.9
Spirit:	8.6
Friends/Family:	4
Love:	2.1
Finance:	3.6
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

The Womens!

This weekend I went on a Women's retreat. It was awesome. I didn't rest as much as I wanted to, but I did get to connect with a lot of neat women. I have been wishing that I had more women friends in the area. I realized at the retreat that sometimes when I feel lonely, I am just not seeing all the people who reach out to me. I was just given so much love and positive energy. It was awesome.

Blog Categories with blogger

What!? I searched forever for ways to add blog categories to blogger and now I find three links in quick succession. Rock on, little internet!

Here they are:

• A very funky way to add categories to blogger, and where it all began.
• How to make a drop down menu for categories
• 3 ways to use del.icio.us for categories in blogger
• And the easiest one of all from Orangewise: "Using blogsearch it is pretty easy to have simple categories on your blogspot."

I was using technorati tags, but it was a pain to copy and paste them every time. I'm going to look into the methods described in the links. Liking easy, I am going to experiment with Orangewise's way first. Result: Does not give a comprehensive list of links. Conclusion: easy, but sadly, sucky.

Does anyone know of any more ways? Does anyone have an "in" with the Blogger people so we can just convince them to make Blogger category enabled? Are you even working on it Blogger people?? (Don't get angry, Blogger-gods, I appreciate all the free bounty. I'm just askin.)

Oh, oh, and check it out! People even have theories about categories! Check out this article by Clay Shirky on Categories, Links, and Tags. I decided to actually read it, and it's fascinating, especially if you get a little anal about your ontology.

All the gory details (I just couldn't tell you at the time.)

Well, one thing I can say about getting colonic hydrotherapy, it makes you want to chew your food well. Did you know that carrots often do not get digested? And you don't even want to know about nuts and seeds.