Embroidery and Beadwork by Mary Yaeger

My female merit badges illustrate female "rites of passage" as well as the myriad physical manipulations women undergo to achieve cultural ideals of beauty, such as weight watching, whether or not to shave or wear makeup, etc. I've created tiny replicas of female products, such as a birth control pill pack and a pregnancy test. The miniature scale and meticulous, hand-embroidered surfaces convey my impressions of growing up female in our culture.

Female Merit Badge Descriptions for a Poster by Mary Yaeger

See me blabber at LockerGnome:

LockerGnome: Web Developers LockerGnome: Windows Fanatics

Now, if only no one finds out how clueless I really am....

Do you ever stop feeling like a fraud, or that you're just acting like you have a clue and soon everyone will find out and point out to you what a clueless old woman you really are. Forty still seems old, I'm mostly over the shock now, but not quite.

I'm surprised at the feedback I'm getting. I post something clueless and people email me back with ideas and suggestions. It's very kind of them.

Right now I am fighting the browser wars on my computer. Trying Firefox, MaxThon, Crazy Browser, SlimBrowser and another which I can't remember the name of at the moment. Anyway, as much as I like the tabbed browsing which is missing in MS IExplorer, I must have my StumbleUpon and Google toolbars, functional. I miss them when they aren't there.

Suite101.com: Suite University

The main problem with Suite101 (in my opinion) are those Google banner ads which take up too much front line real estate on their topic pages. Each time you open one of the network of topics you must scroll down to see the real content. Those ads make the site look unprofessional and spammy. In the old days we would have said seedy but spam has surpassed seediness.

Anyway, the best things about Suite are the topics which include fairly good to really good articles, written by people who have a personal interest in that topic. The other really good thing about Suite is just new this past month. They now have free online courses. They were not free before but the site policy has changed. Sure, it's a way to bring in traffic but the courses are there for anyone. I didn't even have to register or login with the site.

You may think the courses are just soupy (lacking in usefulness and meaty content) but they are worth checking out. I'm taking a course about web searching right now, just for the heck of it. I've been searching the web almost 10 years but you never know, I could come across something new and isn't that what it's all about?