It’s that time again! National Blog Posting Month starts Saturday. I know my posts have been pretty sparse lately, but hopefully this will inspire me to post more often. If anyone wants to join me or is planning on participating, please go to my NaBloPoMo page and be my friend! Here’s to a month of posting! Hip hip hurrah! (I really hope I don’t regret this!)
And no it’s not about politics.
So, Arizona State - usually a football powerhouse - has had major football suckage this season. And University of Arizona - our rivals - have been doing fairly well. Of course, as long as ASU beats UA it’s a successful season in my book. ;)
Now comes word that ASU not only has been picked 15th nationally in a preseason basketball poll (UA not ranked), but they are expected to finish 2nd in the Pac-10 and UA 5th. UA - the team that won 4(?) national titles. (I’m sure my UA friends will correct me on that if I’m wrong.)
ASU suckage in football and looking good (pre-season wise at least - reality remains to be seen) in basketball. UA the opposite (okay, I don’t know that they’re ranked in football, but they have a winning record at least).
Definite signs of the apocalypse.
Hey! So hi there. I’ve been a bad blogger, I know. I really would like to do a post about our trip to Prescott this past weekend, and I’ll get to it at some point! But right now I want to tell you how brilliant I am!
So for her 4th birthday which is um, oh just over a month away now, (STOP THAT!), LG is getting a big girl bed. Not just any big girl bed, but the canopy bed I myself got on MY 4th birthday. Yes, we still have (most) of it. We’re going to repaint it and most of the canopy frame is missing, so Mike will be making a new canopy frame, but still…my bed from when I was a little girl. I think that’s kind of pretty awesome. I even dug out pictures from when I got my bed! (I will share those at some point I promise!)
Anyway, I found an adorable bedding set at Wal-Mart and went over there this afternoon to get it. Of course, they didn’t have the quilt set. They only had the comforter set which is still cute, but not as cute as the quilt. Also more expensive. Also includes bedskirt which we didn’t really need. So, I stood there in a quandary for a few minutes. Do I just get it and not use the bedskirt? Do I go to another Wal-hell and see if they have it there? Do I order it online? Decisions, decisions. Oh, I should add at this point that neither of these sets include a canopy. I found a canopy pattern on ebay and I was going to find some complimentary fabric and make a canopy for her - really how hard can a canopy be? I think not that hard. So, back to me standing in Wal-Mart trying to figure out what to do about the bedding. I’m standing there, trying to decide when it hits me. Bedskirts are the same size as the bed, right? So, why couldn’t we just make the bedskirt into the canopy??? We might have to take it apart and rework it, but still - it’s easier than finding fabric and making it from scratch! So, that sealed it. I got the bedding, a throw pillow and a sheet set. I got a waterproof mattress cover (nighttime potty training will be upon us before we know it) and a new “big girl” pillow. (They had really smooshy ones for $2.50 - can’t beat that.) It wasn’t cheap, but it’s Wal-Mart, so it wasn’t horrible either. And I also don’t have to go get fabric, etc. to make the canopy. Yay me!
Of course all my brilliance inside Wal-hell was nearly overshadowed by the fact that when I went outside, I could. not. find. my car. I was starting to get a little panicky to be honest. Did someone steal it? Why on earth would they want to steal my car? Some nice lady must have recognized the look on my face, because she asked me if I was looking for my car and recommended the beeper, which I was about to use, but then as I was walking away from her (which if nothing else, it felt good to commiserate with someone and not feel totally stupid and alone wandering around), I thought I spied it. In the other half of the parking lot. The half of the parking lot I had not been wandering around for the past (what felt like forever) several minutes. And yes indeed, it was my car. Parked on the side of parking lots I never park on. Sheesh. I have always hated Wal-Mart. I hate it even more now.
I’m curious, though. Do you have a specific side of parking lots you park in so that you always have a general idea of where you left your car? Or are you not as scatterbrained as I am and just park wherever because you always remember where you left it?
Everybody Needs Gadgets
Food! Glorious Food!
Pumpkin cake with whiskey whipped cream
Creative Pursuits
An illustrated explanation of exposure.
How to photograph natural looking portraits
10 tips to photograph an African safari (because I’m sure all of us will be going on one any day now)
Techno Geekery
Facebook now taking pizza orders
10 tips to keep your laptop safe while traveling
Happy Holidays
13 nights of Halloween dress-up!
7 questions (and answers) about Halloween.
Life Is a Highway
Five classic clutter-busting strategies
Top 10 real estate search tools
For the Kids
Another site with great kid projects
Weekly Features
Obviously, Surfer Sunday is late today. I’ve been out of town, but we’re on our way back home. But never fear, it will show up either later today or tomorrow!
Or as LG still says, birfday!
I think at some point in your adult life (especially after you hit about 35 or 40), birthdays cease to become about age. In fact, thinking about your age going up is kind of depressing. However, realizing that you’ve made it through another year of life is definitely worth celebrating. And I had a great one! (Read on …)
Everybody Needs Gadgets
Electric peeler - now that’s probably essential. ;)
Food! Glorious Food!
Banana maple bundt cake with walnut praline swirl
Homemade “maple syrup” (if you can’t afford the ridiculously expensive real thing on a regular basis)
How to keep fruits and veggies fresh
Healthy ways to eat chocolate. (Is that an oxymoron?)
5 tips for cooking perfect pasta
Stuffed bell peppers - my mom used to make something similar when I was a kid. I think I need to try this!
Spicy coconut chicken casserole via Bright Star
Creative Pursuits
How to use vintage lenses with your DSLR
Using an aperture mask to create unusually shaped bokeh.
Discover how to become a photojournalist.
Techno Geekery
Organize information about your things in one place.
Happy Holidays
Some great ideas for Halloween party decorations and atmosphere; food; crafts; games and activities; treats and sweets.
Life Is a Highway
15 reasons why you’re not losing weight.
The title of the site says it all: confusing words.
15 sites that will make you smarter.
Things That Make You Go Hmmm
Is your clothes dryer properly ventilated?
7 baseball pitches and the physics behind them
Internet use could be good for the brain.
Good Ideas
The economy is a mess, but here are five small luxuries we can still enjoy.
Good Reads
Advice for a teenage daughter.
Tissue alert! Sometimes love is meant to be. via Jen at Never a Dull Moment
For the Kids
Parents’ guide to internet safety
50 things to do with your kids before they grow up series for different US cities.
Laughter Is the Best Medicine
I’m sure this would never happen in our house. *cough*
Too Much Time on My Hands
How well can you orient without measurement? (I got 5.74 on the first try and 5.50 on the second.)
Test your reaction time. (Mine was 0.266.)
Weekly Features
Well, it’s almost my birthday. But I guess you could say the celebrating started tonight since I got to go to the Amy Grant concert! This marks the 5th time I’ve seen her in concert. The first was the Heart in Motion tour back in 1991. That was followed by two Christmas concerts. And the last time I got to see her was back in 2002. I was supposed to have seen her in 1997 for the Behind the Eyes tour, but one of my students gave me chicken pox and I had to give my ticket away. If you only knew how much I love that album, you’ll understand how devastating it was at the time.
This concert tour is to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the album Lead Me On. She gathered as many members of her actual band from that tour (which was most of them), and they didn’t do anything that was recorded after 1988. Which, although there is plenty of good music from the past 20 years, was fine with me because one of my very very favorite Amy albums is Unguarded which she released in 1985. So, there was plenty of music from both that album and Lead Me On. She also did Sing Your Praise to the Lord and El Shaddai (1982), Angels (1984), Father’s Eyes (1979), Stay for Awhile (1986). Their last song during the encore was The Byrds’ Turn Turn Turn and she also did a new song that will probably be included on the album she’s set to start recording in January (yay!) I wish I could remember more, but some of the lyrics were something like: there’s so much good in the worst of us and there’s so much bad in the best of us. The lyrics were very fitting for what our country seems to be going through right now.
I wasn’t actually going to go to the concert because 1) concert tickets are expensive and 2) Mike had to work tonight so he couldn’t go with me. I really wanted to go, though, and by some stroke of luck, Marlene’s hubby got four free tickets! So I went with them and their oldest daughter (SB) and we had a great time. I’m so thankful for my friends who bless me with tickets to amazing things (like the first game of the World Series in 2001)! And other than Mike, there’s no one else I’d rather have shared it with!
The concert was at the Celebrity Theatre which is in the round - and the stage spins. It’s pretty wild and cool and there really isn’t a bad seat in the place - it’s very intimate and that is definitely the best way to see Amy Grant!
LG is spending the night at Grandma’s and Mike will be home from his gig soon. In the meantime, I’m home alone with my dog and I can have the tv or the music on my computer as loud as I want it! That’s the sum total of my craziness on a night without a kid. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I’d have gone to see Mike’s band. I thought about it. But, naw. I’d rather lounge in my pjs. ;)
We are a bunch of whiners. We as in Americans. There was a visiting priest at church tonight who works in Jamaica. (He’s from Nebraska, by the way.) He talked about the slums in Jamaica. One in particular has 300,000 residents. A slum with 300,000 people. Mind boggling. They have no electricity. They live in tiny huts. They have no running water. They don’t have toilets. Their choice at dinnertime is not what to eat, but who gets to eat that day. $100 American could feed a family of 5…for a year. Just think of that. I’ve been known to drop $100 at Target on a good day (or maybe it’s a bad day). On stuff that we probably don’t even need. And yet that $100 could feed a family of 5 in one of these countries for a year? Hard to imagine. Yes we have poverty here. But poverty here is nothing like that. It’s not the abject poverty that occurs in other countries. These people have pretty much no hope of getting out of poverty. In America, I think there is always a possibility of rising above your circumstances. I dunno, I guess it just made all the problems and the worry that’s been going on just a bit less important. It really puts things into perspective. If we could use 1/10th the energy we’ve been using arguing about politics and the economy and abortion and so forth to help those who are less fortunate, what a better world it would be.
If you are interested in helping, go here.
Everybody Needs Gadgets
Food! Glorious Food!
Creative Pursuits
Happy Holidays
Techno Geekery
Things That Make You Go Hmmm
Just looking at this makes my stomach hurt.
Good Ideas
How to look fabulous in photos.
Good Reads
Love doesn’t care about extra chromosomes.
For the Kids
Ford adds parental controls to car keys.
Encouraging kids to think outside of the box.
Kids under 5 should not have exotic pets.
Lessons to teach your kids about digital photography.
Weekly Features
I have been craving pizza since yesterday. No, not that kind of craving, just the “boy does that sound good” kind. So, after LG and I went to Michael’s, we drove around trying to find one of those Pizza Hut drive-thrus. I never found one, so I’m thinking they don’t have those anymore, but via GPS, we ended up at Streets of New York. I went in, told them I needed a pizza to go and I only had $14 and what could I get for that? He showed me and I ordered it. When he rung it up, it was a little over the $14, so he said, I’ll give you a dollar off, so it came out to under $14.
I’m not sure if that’s a sign of the times or just really good customer service, but either way I really appreciated it. And the pizza was really good, too!
Everybody Needs Gadgets
This just makes me laugh. And then shake my head. And then laugh again.
Food! Glorious Food!
How to peel hard-boiled eggs without peeling.
Creative Pursuits
Techno Geekery
Happy Holidays
Alternatives to trick-or-treating.
Cute and spooky Halloween ideas
Life Is a Highway
How to break through writer’s block.
Online persona can help or hinder college and work prospects.
Things That Make You Go Hmmm
Good Ideas
Good Reads
Laughter Is the Best Medicine
Thanks to Marlene for this link!
Too Much Time on My Hands
Get a song unstuck from your head.
Weekly Features
I’ve always liked to name my hard drives. There was Xena, and Warrior Princess. There was Gabrielle. (If you’re a Xena fan you get that one.) There was Eowyn and there was Galadriel. (Those are Lord of the Rings characters if you’re wondering.) So, I have a new computer. And it needed a name. I sort of wanted to stick with my fantasy type names, and I could have used Arwen (also from Lord of the Rings), but I wasn’t so into that one, so I went far back in my scifi/fantasy arsenal to the original Battlestar Galactica (you know, the one with Dirk Benedict and Richard Hatch - not from Survivor). And my new computer has been christened…Cassiopeia!
Dear Little Girl,
How can it be that you are only two months away from being four years old? The time has gone by so quickly. I still have the little card they gave me in the hospital with your wee little footprints on it. I have it hanging on the wall so I can see it and remember how truly tiny and miraculous you were. Those footprints don’t even look like they could belong to a real baby now. Your foot wasn’t even as long as my index finger. That’s how tiny you were. Today we went out to lunch with my friend T and her daughter J. J was born just a couple of days earlier in her mom’s pregnancy than you were in mine, but she was about half your size. She’s still a tiny thing at 20 months old and it was amazing to see you next to her, so big and strong and grown up. She was mad because she was teething and she was hungry and so she was understandably fussy. You kindly allowed me to give your fruit cup to J without hesitation and that made her much happier. When we left the restaurant, you held her hand and looked like such a giant next to her. You practically dragged her along behind you, and I think you were actually trying to be gentle. But you outweigh her by about twenty pounds, so I know it’s hard. I can’t believe how much you’ve grown. I can’t believe how fast the time has gone. I can’t believe this year of your life is almost over.
Based on Gemini designed by geeksmakemehot.
Powered by WordPress Strayhorn
