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Tuesday Five
I saw this on a brand new blog today, Blues Butterfly’s 5 & 10s, and thought, why not, I’m in. So, here goes, a fun meme to start the new year. Fast five questions. 1. Do you feel respected at your workplace? How do you feel disrespected at your workplace? What can you do to improve your work situation? Sorry, I don’t blog about work. Haven’t you heard the term ‘dooced’? 2. Tell us about a dish that is special to your hometown or your family. My hometown claims to be the asparagus capital of the world, or at least, to produce the most asparagus in the world. So if…
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365 days until my birthday! (or, 0 days until my birthday!)
I saw this meme back in November, over at Josey’s blog. I decided to save it for my birthday. And just right when you’re still feeling kinda puny from being sick, and though the stomach flu has left you, you now seem to be enjoying a chest cold during vacation. Sigh. what do to: Pick your birth month. Bold the 5-10 traits that best apply to you. Copy to your own blog, with all twelve months. JANUARY: Stubborn and hard-hearted. Ambitious and serious. Loves to teach and be taught. Always looking at people’s flaws and weaknesses. Likes to criticize. Hardworking and productive. Smart, neat and organized. Sensitive and has deep…
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Merry Sickmas!
(disgusting but sadly appropriate graphic found here) We’re home from Portland, and I must say, it was a mixed bag of a vacation. We arrived on Saturday evening, and my poor dad was feeling fine, but then not so fine, and by the end of the evening he had all of the oh-so-fun symptoms of either stomach flu or food poisoning. Yay. We all hoped for food poisoning (so it would go away quickly, and so no one else would get sick), and washed our hands a lot. Too bad, it was stomach flu, and the good news kept coming in. My sister, brother-in-law, and niece had a variation (though…
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Merry Christmas!
This is Maya at about 9 months old. Laluna had Santa come to see Chee and Big Sis, and Maya was there as well, and got a peek. She had a lot of stranger anxiety, so I’m surprised she let this even happen. We’re off to Portland now, back on the 27th, so no bloggy-blog from me for a few days. 🙂 I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, and that it is filled with laughter, family, and yummy food.
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Untitled…
Have you ever cried the make-up off of your face for someone you don’t know well, have only met once or twice? Sadly, I did exactly that today. An ex-coworker of mine, who I liked very much, lost her daughter to suicide last week, and the funeral was today. All I could think of was what a sad, tragic waste. What a beautiful, loving person she was, 22 years old with her whole life ahead of her. Surrounded by family and friends who loved her very much. Her mother’s sobs ripped my heart out of my chest and stamped it into the ground. I cannot imagine anything worse. (No picture…
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The Golden Compass/Northern Lights
The Golden Compass (published first in the U.K. under the title Northern Lights) is the first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The protagonist, Lyra Belacqua, is an 11-year old girl being raised by the professors and staff of Oxford’s (fictional) Jordan College. She leads a fairly rough and tumble life, learning what the professors have the time to teach her, and the ability to teach, considering they are used to talking to college students and fellow professors, not children. She also learns the arts of lying, self-defense, and the value of loyalty in her life outdoors, running semi-wild with the Gyptian children who frequent Oxford. Lyra has…
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If you haven’t got a ha’penny then God bless you!
From the John Denver/Muppet Christmas special, one of my all time favorites: Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat Please put a penny in the old man’s hat If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do If you haven’t got a ha’penny then God bless you! Which brings me, sadly, to the point of this post. I read yesterday, and then heard on NPR later in the day, that donations to charities are abysmally low this year.  The newspaper article was mainly talking about gifts of toys and clothing, both new and used. The radio story (from The News Hour) was about donations of food to food…
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Paradigm Shift
I’m a reader, and I grew up in a family of readers, and even the side of the family that I didn’t know until I was an adult, all readers. I grew up surrounded by books, where the most expensive part of moving from one state to another was the books, because the furniture we had wasn’t really worth shipping, but the books were. So, the biggest walls in our house were always covered with books, which were alphabetized (for fiction) and categorized then alphabetized (non-fiction). Always, books were the number one thing in the house. In my adult years, however, we have often had the luxury of a room…
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Thanks!
Look what the Hanukkah Armadillo brought to our house earlier this week! Now how did he know that there’s a writers strike and nothing on TV and gosh, we’re pathetic and love us some 90210 fun? Thanks, Hanukkah Armadillo!
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Splotchy’s Story Virus
My mom tagged me for an interesting meme…a story virus, I guess it’s called. Each person adds to the story, and then tags someone else to go forward with it, and includes the links of those who wrote before. It was started by Splotchy, hence the title. So, here goes: I woke up hungry. I pulled my bedroom curtain to the side and looked out on a hazy morning. I dragged myself into the kitchen, in search of something to eat. I reached for a jar of applesauce sitting next to the sink, and found it very cold to the touch. I opened the jar and realized it was frozen.…
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Eat Poppa, Eat! Nobody Likes a Skinny Santa!
I assume you’ve all seen that some folks have decided that Santa is too fat. He should provide a better example to children, they say, by exercising and eating more fruits and veggies, fewer cookies and cheese sandwiches. (Maya tells me she learned that in Europe, kids leave cheese sandwiches for Santa, rather than cookies and milk…I have no idea if this is true or if someone pulled her leg.) Then I read on my mom’s blog that there’s a group called “Keep Santa Fat“, and you can go to their website, sign a petition to keep Santa from going on Atkins (watch out, Rudolph!), and a pound of food…
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Wordless Wednesday
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Monday Meme ~ Christmas Version
We’re still in the wonderful week of Hanukkah, and we’ve eaten the Stollen for St. Nicholas Day. What a confusing family, huh? Basically, we just love to celebrate many differnt cultures, even if they are not our own. This coming Saturday we’ll be baking Christmas Cookies and so on, and it’s a most wonderful time of the year. How better to commemorate it than with a meme? This one came from Scarlett, who started this meme herself just for us, and calls it “12 of my favorite things”. Here are her rules: Please share 12 of your favorite Christmas things: they can be memories, traditions, songs, presents, beliefs, whatever it…
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Subprime Woes
I heard something on the radio yesterday that ticked me off. That’s nothing new, really, I listen to a lot of NPR, and there’s often news and politics involved, which often ticks me off. So of course yesterday the big news was the subprime ‘bailout’, a move by the Bush Administration to help a few of the folks out there who are destined to lose their homes because they will not be able to afford the higher payments once their mortgages reset into a higher interest rate. There’s an assumption among many that these people deserve to lose their homes, because they were gambling anyway, and took on more debt than they…
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Happy Birthday, Richard!
Today is my brother Richard’s birthday, and even though he doesn’t read blogs (I don’t think), and certainly doesn’t read mine (he’s too busy making groovy cg art on his computer), I’ll wish him a wonderful birthday here. The sucky part of living so far away from your family is that you can’t be with them on special days. Like today. If they hadn’t all deserted me by moving to Alaska, we could all go out to dinner tonight, and he and I could tease our poor mom mercilessly, or, perhaps, his lovely wife, Kathy, my mom, and I, could all gang up on Richard and tease him mercilessly. Ted…