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Thirteen Thoughts
 1. Today is the last day of NaBloPoMo. It’s been fun reading daily entries from some of the less frequent posters who took the challange. I’m glad so many folks participated! 2. I got my hair done yesterday….gotta say, I love it! Something about loving a haircut that makes things good all around, huh? And being all blonde again doesn’t hurt, either. 3. Stupid cold. Ted and I both came down with colds last week, and they’re slowly going away. Mine was never horrid, but I gotta say, I’ll be glad when it’s completely gone. I feel all post-nasaly, blech. 4. I’m glad it’s getting cold. I like the cold…
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Mean Girl
I read on Kvetch the other day, about the pain involved in realizing that she didn’t fit in with her friends anymore when she was in Jr. High School, until she discovered that there were other kids that felt that way as well, and she could move on. When she did so, she very bravely mustered the courage to call her old friends, and tell them that she couldn’t be friends with them anymore. I wish I had been so brave. When I was in 8th grade, I made friends with a girl who had just moved in across the street from me, M. We both loved horses, we were…
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Happy Birthday, Maya and Melissa!
These beautiful women are my sisters, Maya (left) and Melissa (right), and today is their birthday! Melissa doesn’t read my blog, or any blog, and barely has time with a 3 year old and a 4 month old to check her email. Maya reads when she gets a chance, but she has a job and a beautiful 2 year old of her own. So it’s entirely possible that neither of them will see this post. No matter. I wanted everyone to see them anyway, and to say, “Happy Birthday to J’s sisters!” I first met my sisters in January of 1988…after having met my dad in the fall of ’87,…
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A Meme About the Movies…
I was sort of tagged for this meme by MsMama. Looked like fun, though I’ll admit it took more time than I expected it to take. 1. Popcorn or candy? Popcorn, but either no butter or just a little. Too greasy on my fingers. I used to dip it in my coke as a child, because I figured it made it soft enough to not damage my braces. Kinda gross, but I got used to it, and now I like it. 2. Name a movie you’ve been meaning to see forever. Sorry, can’t think of any. With Netflix, I can pretty much see anything I want. 🙂 Someone said I…
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My Sister’s Keeper
“What do parents look like?” “You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he’s really just hoping he makes it all the way across? Like that.” I recently finished the second book in the From the Stacks reading challenge. The book was My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult. The premise is this: A young girl, Kate, is terribly ill. She has leukemia, and the only thing that can save her, maybe, is donated umbilical cord blood. So, her parents have another child, Anna, a child that they select from several embryos because she…
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1984
I saw this on Gina’s blog. The idea is to take top 100 songs from the year you graduated from High School, bold the ones you loved, strikeout the ones you hated, and leave the others plain. I’m going to try to be honest here, and tell the truth about how I felt then, no matter how embarrassing that may be now. I mean, come on..Say Say Say? I bought the single. Sigh. 1. When Doves Cry, Prince 2. What’s Love Got To Do With It, Tina Turner 3. Say Say Say, Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson 4. Footloose, Kenny Loggins (I did love the movie, though…) 5. Against All…
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Sweet Potato Pudding
Ted heard some folks talking about this recipe on NPR, and he asked me if I would make it instead of the candied yams that I usually make for Thanksgiving. So, trying my best to be a good wife, I said yes. Guess what? They were a HIT! Everyone loved them, with the possible exception of me, since I don’t like sweet potatoes, but I liked them more than any other sweet potatoes I’ve ever had before, so that’s saying something. It was decided that I will be bringing this recipe from now on. So, if you make sweet potatoes for Christmas, grab this recipe. If not, grab it and…
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Packaging…
I went to Target the other day, and I picked up some contact lens solution. Pretty good deal, right? It’s not buy one get one free, but the pricing was great, and it LOOKED like buy one, get one free. See how both of the containers are equal in size? Nice. See Ted in the background? See how happy he is? Also nice. Then, I picked up some toothpaste, and look, a FREE tube of toothpaste comes with the one you pay for. Gotta love that. The way this is packaged, even though the front of the box clearly says that the FREE tube is going to be 4.2 oz,…
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Blogaversary
I first (well, not first) came to the bloggy world one year ago today. (I say not first, because I actually started a blogger account, wrote one post, then promptly lost interest back in the summer of 2002.) If you look at Cherry and Autumn’s Mom‘s archives, you’ll notice that they started the same month that I did. I’d like to claim that I started it all, that I was the leader of our little group jumping into this world, but the truth is that I was the holdout. I felt like if I started a blog, I wouldn’t really have anything to say. People would be bored and no…
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Another Pilgrim Post
After yesterday’s post about The Scarlet Letter, a tale of Puritans in New England, I thought I’d continue on a theme. After all, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. YAY! I was intrigued to see an ad in the newspaper for a television show, promising to tell a thorough, factual story of the crossing of the Mayflower and the beginning of the Plymouth colony. As this is Thanksgiving week, I thought it might be an interesting show to watch. The show is called “Desperate Crossing – The Untold Story of the Mayflower” The story starts in the early 1600s, with the Puritans (as we now call them – they were called separatists back…
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The Scarlet Letter
I’ve finished the first book of my reading challenge. One of my New Year’s resolutions a year or two ago was to go back and read some of the ‘classics’ that I missed in high school and college. One such book was The Scarlet Letter. Reading books written 150 years ago requires me to slow down, to concentrate. I liken it to reading a book in a second language; a language of which I am familiar & fluent, yet it is not my first language, so I have to stop and consider the meanings of the various words and phrases. The style of the writing is such that I could…
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What’s He Building In There?
 Without gossiping too much about our neighbors, let me just say that I was reminded recently that the identity that we show to the world is not always the identity that we show inside our homes. We recently found out that one of our neighbors has been leading a life that we merely had hints of, and the depths of which we had not imagined. Thinking of this reminded me of a day last year…I was walking back to work, after walking Maya to school. I passed by a house with its alarm going off. I used to work for an alarm company, so I know that there are…
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TiVo Alert!
Popcorn and toast? For Thanksgiving? You bet! A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is on tonight at 8:00, on ABC. ENJOY!
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Kismit
A few weeks ago, I was talking to my step-mom on the phone, and she was telling me about a yummy recipe she has, for pistachio crusted cod filets. Hmmm, I thought, that sounds pretty good. So she mailed it to me.2 days later, Ted came home from the grocery store with a bag of pistachios. What? We NEVER buy pistachios. I swear, I’ve known him almost 20 years, and I don’t think we’ve EVER bought pistachios before. I’m not dissing pistachios. I love them. But they’re addictive and if there’s a bowl of them in front of me, I’ll eat the whole bowl, and I have witnesses who will…
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Idaho? No thanks.
Not to lump a whole state into one nutty town, but I’m thinking no. Has anyone read about this news story? Here’s the gist. The tiny town of Greenleaf Idaho has passed a law that residents “who do not object on religious or other grounds…keep a gun in the home.” What? OK, don’t worry, all you have to do is object on any grounds you want to be exempt from this law, so it’s pretty much gutless. But what is the reason behind this law? “…citizens should be armed in case Greenleaf, which sits on high ground, is overrun by refugees in a Katrina-like flood.” Get that? Because when your…