Happy Holidays

 

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Self-portrait, this time from my Drawing class...

New Toy

This thing is SO COOL!!

We're in Dallas right now, and I've got six or seven books with me - all in this little thing that's smaller than my planner and weighs next to nothing. I take it with me to read on the train, and when I'm eating lunch by myself while Ken is in classes. And I can switch between books - close one and read something else - and whenever I go back to the first book, it'll open to the page where I left off.

So far, I've read "A Long Way Down" by Nick Hornby, and I've started on Gregory Maguire's "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister" (I know, I know, I should've read that a long time ago - it's been on my list for ages!) And I'm also reading "Bad Girls of the Bible" a chapter at a time, for my morning devotional. All on my Kindle - SO cool...

The next one I want to get is the complete works of Mark Twain. It's like five bucks.

Then I gotta figure out how to get one of these for Ken.

Number 10: Check!

Number 10: Check!

One Step Forward...

I will soon be able to take Number 10 off my list of 43 Things. We are saying goodbye to our minivan (which is now costing us over $150/month in gas) and getting a Prius. It's being delivered from a dealership in Colorado, and should be here later this week.

It's a good thing, too, because I need the Prius to appease my conscience. Today I not only wasted hundreds of gallons of water (No. 4) by filling, draining, and re-filling a waterbed, but I also ate McDonald's for breakfast (No. 30).
Ughhhh...

Anyway, I'm excited about the new car. It's a 2005 in shiny silver,
with a 10-gallon tank and 60mpgs in the city. Hooray!

Once Upon A Midnight Dreary

That damned rosebush is tap-tap-tapping at the bedroom window.

Mamaw says you're supposed to prune your rosebushes by Valentine's Day.
I didn't. Now I remember why I got out there and trimmed it last year, in the first place. First thing tomorrow - well, not first thing - but tomorrow, I'll have to find those clippers and get out there and cut the thing's stupid fingers off.

Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap...then there's the roar of the fans, and the singing of the crickets - who can sleep through all this?

I used to cut roses with a pair of hand-held clippers.
Once upon a time, far far away.

The hours are counting down. The strangers are coming - a hundred of them and more, with their cold hands. I can't keep them away; my hands are small, and my voice isn't loud enough.

I used to cut roses, and put them in vases, in every room of the house.
But the vases are gone, and soon everything else will be gone too.

That rosebush is still there, though, right outside my bedroom window,
and tonight it will suffer for the wrongs done today.

Lubbock Recycles...Not.

I've been trying to be more conscientious, aksing for paper instead of plastic for the groceries, rounding up the hundred-and-one old phone books we had lying around (seems like we get a new phone book every six weeks or so) and breaking down all the cardboard boxes and loading it all into the back of my Suzuki to take to the recycling bins.

Well, the first problem with that was finding the recycling bins - you know, all the blue bins that you sort your recyclables into? I've only seen one set of them, and it's in a neighborhood that I don't really drive through all that often - I have to be going there to go there. But Ken and I were down that way the other day, in the 'Zuki, and so we stopped to put all the recyclables we'd gathered into the bins.

...Or so we thought. There were maybe eight or nine bins, all labelled according to what was meant to be put into each. Colored glass, clear glass, tin, aluminum, newspaper, plastic bottles, computer paper, etc. Except that there was not a bin for cardboard. Not one for phone books, or paper other than computer paper. All the stuff we had in the back of the car, we ended up just throwing it in the dumpster, because there were no appropriately designated recycle bins for common, everyday recyclables such as cardboard, brown paper grocery sacks, or old phone books.

This town...

Sample Text

A Disappointing Day

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning, but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

That's the sample text provided by Typepad in the editing screen, to show what changes to the main body format of your blog will look like, before you view the finished project. I've been playing around with this site's design and color scheme, so I've been in the editing screen for about an hour now. I've been there before, and the sample text has always been the same. It just now dawned on me that I know where that text comes from...

The End

No more math! I'm done, and I got an 88 in the class. So that also means no more 4.0, but that's ok. And now I've got a 1-week break before my next class begins.

And it's the end, sadly, for Jericho as well. We found out last night that CBS has pulled the plug again, for real this time. So tomorrow night's episode will be the final one, and yet another good TV show that we really liked will be history before its time.

Ah, well.

One more week of Math!

I was right to take Math early, while I'm still excited just to be in school again. My 4.0 is a thing of the past. I have an 89 in Math right now, and that will probably go down some more after this week's assignments, but at this point I don't even care! I'm just thankful to be almost done with this class.

One more week, then I get to take Digital Image Manipulation (Photoshop), which should be a lot of fun.

For now, though...back to my homework, which isn't fun at all. Graphing parabolas and quadratic word problems - yuck, yuck, yuck!

It's All Coming Back

When did I become a TV junkie?? Who let this happen?

I don't know, but the end of the writers' strike has got me grinning from ear to ear. All my favorites are coming back to finish the season. (But please allow 4 - 6 weeks for delivery.)

Jericho has already returned, a fact which caused much rejoicing around our house. It fell victim, not to the writers' strike, but to an incredibly poor programming decision by CBS. The fans spoke up (including my husband) and Jericho is back on the air, tucked away into a horrible little back-corner time slot on Tuesday nights, right after Big Brother. That's okay. It's still there.

The other shows that I've somehow become hooked on - two sitcoms, three dramas - are shooting new episodes and will begin airing in mid-March (How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory) to early April (Criminal Minds, CSI, and Numb3rs - which will be my reward for surviving the College Math class that I start today.)

Rand is back!

Yayyy! Oh, so many people that I miss - old friends - even if I haven't talked to them for months or years.

Rand is the one who got me started on this whole bloggedy thing, and his writing is still a source of inspiration (except when he writes about his job, which seems to involve computers and code, and is so far over my head - and not just because I'm short!)

So anyway, Mr. Inspiration hasn't bothered to write anything in simply forever...and his excuse is that he's been traveling all over the world. Globe-trotting. And now he's back, from outer space, with news of the latest fashion trend: Visible Butt Cracks. Swear to Buddah. Don't yell at me, go check it out for yourself - he's at RandNix.com

Good to have you back.

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