I hope that everyone “out there” is having joyous days…  whichever way you celebrate!

My daughter came home a couple of weeks ago for her spring break. Boy was I glad she was home! My son lives right here in San Antonio, so this was a wonderful family time for the four of us… plus Sprite, makes five!

Unfortunately, now that she lives in Massachusetts, it takes her a whole day to travel to and from school, which of course shaves off two days of her week long break. That’s the breaks! (As “they” say… although I am so “out of it,” I’m not sure “they” still say that!)

My daughter is the designated family member to get us out of the house, enjoying things that San Antonio has to offer. Of course, since she was home for such a short time, that meant one day out. And, of course, with Sprite being so old, that day is shortened to (at the most!) a five hour window of time that we can be away from the house.

I should clarify that we do go out other times, but what I mean by a “day out,” is doing an activity that we enjoyed doing when both of our children were growing up… You know the type… the zoo, museums, caverns, ETC… the types of things that tourists do when they come here.

Unfortunately, her spring break coincided with the spring break of at least the largest school district here in San Antonio… which meant that there were LOTS of people doing the same thing.

We visited a wildlife ranch… which turned out to be… I would guess by the crowds… the most visited place on the day that we chose to go. WOW!!! LOTS of people. LOTS of cars. And, LOTS of animals who had been so over-fed by all of the people in all of the cars, that we were only able to see the few of them who were napping under the closer trees.

The “moral” of this story is: So what if the actual activity turns out to be a bust? What’s important is the time spent with each other… even though a lot of that time was spent (by at least one member>>> who was more than likely me!) complaining about all of the people, all of the cars, and all of the missing animals who were in the clumps of trees taking their siestas.

How about you all? Have any of you been enjoying Spring Break?

The other day, I updated my “**ur**   **oir” page (substitute the “**“with “Ch” and you will know the page I’m talking about) and I am now being inundated with so much “!orn   s!am” (substitute the “!” with a “p” and you will know what  I am talking about). I absolutely cannot believe my eyes!!! Luckily, most of it is in an alphabet system that I cannot understand, so I don’t have to catch any of the messages while trying to delete it.

I know what type of messages they are, though, since the first word in the majority of this s!am is the word !orn (same substitution trick as above), so I can guess the gist (or should that be gistS?)

When I say “inundated” I mean just that. This morning I “got to” open up this page to be greeted by over thirty of these messages. Luckily, they are in my the s!am catcher!!! What fun! (NOT!!!) I have tried to figure out why this particular post is the most prone to get program-generated “comments” from machines that want to simply post their links… LOTS of links!!!

This is the very same reason I don’t allow comments to post on my site without first sifting through them. Thank goodness I have the best fire-wall program which is able to go through the comments, and pull the unwanted jerk-y comments from the legitimate  messages. (Anyway, my husband thinks its the best fire-wall program. I just rely on him to know these things… and to install and update my fire-wall as I need it. It’s great to have a “web master” in the family!!!)

I try to make sure that none of your comments are mistakenly caught by our fire-wall, but on days when I have so many s!am in my s!am-catcher, I don’t even look through them. I just hit the delete button and hope I haven’t missed any of your legitimate comments, and also hope that if I do, you will realize that I don’t mean anything personal…

Why is it that people (or machines that are programmed by people) are able to ruin other people’s experiences on the internet?!?!

It makes me quite sad that these programs exist, and that there are so many jerks out there who feel the necessity to program these programs. All I can say about this is:  #&&(* %^^^> **!!!

PS>>> I know that I have written about this before… probably every time I update the “**ur**  **oir” page! And, the reason I am using the code is that if I actually have the entire word posted, the “creep trolls” find the site and send even more!