Persistent researcher gives up!

I am a presistant researcher.  I always figure if I just try to word my search in another way, I will find my answer.  It takes a lot to make me give up.   But, I am about there.

When I reformatted my computer, I lost my favorites.  One of them was a blog that I like to follow.  I have racked and racked my brain for things this blogger talked about but I cannot seem to find her blog.

CLUES:  (Please send me a link to her blog if this sounds familiar!!!)

She is a librarian.

People think she is East Indian but she is really from an island, maybe Samoa??

She lives in the Northwest, maybe Seattle?

Her significant other dances, at any odd time, to make her laugh

They fixed up their house and property, really improving the looks of the property and yet her neighbor gets upset because the one bush drops its leaves on the sidewalk.

She’s very funny and very close to her friends.

GOSH, if we were all reduced to five sentences, what would I be remembered as?

I am an artist?  Did any of you know that?

I live in the midwest.

My significant other sleeps on the couch but we do laugh a lot.

We have fixed up (rehabed) two houses but always wait to do it until we are ready to sell.  So, in the meantime, I live in a house with holes in the kitchen linoleum, a roll in the frontroom carpet and broken tiles by the door.

I try to be funny but my daughter is a natural at it.  She’s also my best friend.

What are your five sentences, or six?

Read Full Post »

Throwing feces and playing with dolls

One of my near daily blogs to check is, Mr. Barlow’s Blog via Mr. Barlow’s Blog.  He’s a science or math teacher who blogs stuff he learns every day.  It is so cool.

A while ago, he blogged about chimps and the fact that they now know that chimps play with sticks, not just use them to suck up ants.  I could have used a chimp with a stick this summer to suck up the tiny ants invading my kitchen.  Oh well!

Chimps, and especially female chimps, use sticks like dolls.  They even build nests for them.

Hmmmm!  At a time when it seems that we have less instincts in raising children, the chimps are gaining more.  I only say this after being at the store where children behave much worse than any chimp I have seen.  Well, not quite.  A child has vomited on me but never thrown their feces at me.

So, given this new information, who descended from whom???

Read Full Post »

ThinkGeek :: Find Stuff

The Geeks have it at our house.  Gaming night is every night and I am apt to find small plastic creatures and dice on the table.  What is odd, is that no one has played a game on that table for some time.  I’m thinking they use the table to empty their pockets.  After all, they use their beds for gaming.  

This past December, while Intelligent teacher daughter awaited the full cast of Big Bang Action figures (she is so disappointed that they are not making these yet), Gaffer received most of his gifts via ThinkGeek :: Find Stuff.  After opening a Vader bank, Vader light sabre chopsticks, Star Wars Ultimate Blueprint book, a light up die, a Dexter Action Figure and assorted other items from ThinkGeek, he looked up, beamed a huge smile and said, “It’s, it’s like a Geeky Christmas.  THANK YOU!” 

In fact, I had to place a second order to finish off gifts for three people from ThinkGeek.  My Geek points are adding up and I literally did 95% of my shopping online.  It is difficult to find a Hawaiian shirt in Brown County, Indiana, and eBay was my source for Vintage Hat Pins.  It was soooooo relaxing.

I am not a big shopper.  The most fun I ever had shopping was years ago and the only time I ever shopped on the day after Thanksgiving.  I went to the mall, in Casper, Wyoming with my mother, and two daughters.  We didn’t buy much but we had fun. 

I would like to add that every year Intelligent Daughter has to mail a package to us after Christmas of all the things the boys have left.  It usually ranges from gifts to cell phone charger cords to socks.  This year, NADA, nothing, not one single thing was left behind.

As for me, I just received my Birthday present, early, from mom and husband.  I have a new Kodak PlaySport camera.  I have found out some interesting things.  They only give minimal instructions, but it is amazingly easy to use.  And, the important lesson, in testing, do not film your own face.  If I have to see my face from that angle and light again, I will have to wear a paper bag at all times.   LOVE memory chips.  Erased that one!  Twice!

A ThinkGeeky Christmas was had by all.

Read Full Post »

Things you can learn at 3:00am when you should be sleeping

I have trouble sleeping.  Not just sleeping, but also staying awake.  At times, I fall asleep with my head on my keyboard.  I usually fall asleep in moving cars (fortunately only once while I was driving), and I tend to doze off when visiting people or sitting.  The only time I don’t fall asleep is at night. 

Since my mother, age 88, has always gone to bed around four am and gotten up around six, I think this may be something in our DNA.   She has been observed falling asleep twice while standing.  Perhaps we were the watchmen/women for the tribe of cavemen we belonged to.  It was up to us to keep sabre tooth tigers at bay.  Now, all it gets me is angry snorts from the dog, who also refuses to move over when I finally am ready to sleep. 

I was recently put on a CPap machine.  (Officially, I wake up 7 1/2 times an hour and 80 times during REM sleep.  And, we wondered why I remembered my strange dreams so well!)  The machine really worked for about two days.  Then, I turned the heat up for the water a notch and slept great for about four days.  I’m up to five on the heated water thing and am thinking by 10 maybe it will just boil my lungs and I can sleep. 

Anyway, here I sit, having reformatted my computer yesterday and with barely anything on it, but the internet, and I am learning so much.  What did you learn, you ask!  Oh, come on, pretend you care even a little bit.

1. There is a reason people find these cute names for their blogs.  Anyone who uses their real name eliminates all the fodder that their family gives them for blogging.  I mean, when you name it Braindebris, you don’t have to tell anyone who Braindebris is (It’s my daughter by the way, but don’t tell anyone.)  But, naming your blog savanvleck, kind of ruins the anonimity you want for telling on your relatives.
2. This is for the times when you realize that Facebook has educated you to the fact that you are staunchly liberal and the rest of your family loves Sarah Palin, and that if your sister asks you one more time, to declare your love for something, you are going to…..  Frankly, I think I am exempt because I, obviously, was stolen from the Gypsies as a child. 
3. Why can’t we have two Facebooks.  One for people who want to stay in touch with other people and see pictures of their children and another for people who are looking for radishes for their imaginary farm?
4. When you format your computer (and since I have done this like every three months this year, I should have known this, but, when you do, you lose your favorites and stay up till 3am searching for things like, “Librarian+Seattle+Blog” to try and replace the bloggers who must be your real family because they laugh at the same things you do. 
5. Of course, since it is 3:00am, after you have spent three hours searching, you realize that you blogged about the science teacher who blogs a fascinating science fact every day (Mr. Barlow’s Blog) and have a link in your own blog to him.  I imagine I might have realized that sooner at 3:pm. 
6. My computer, a Dell Inspiron 1545 (who before I trash talk Dell, I will say, has the most awesome customer service on the face of the earth) has many flaws.  See numerous previous posts for those rantings.  But, the most irritating one I was left with (warranty is now up) is that I type over 100 wpm and for some reason the cursor jumps around all on it’s own.  So, I will be typing away and realize that the cursor is now two lines above where it was and I am typing stuff in the middle of another sentence.  Well, this format I did the smart thing and I downloaded new drivers for the touchpad, first thing.  It has not done the jumping around thing all day.  Fingers crossed!
7. That I still do not remember how to post links well on WordPress.
8. Well, folks, that wonderful little pill I took two hours ago is starting to work.  I guess it is time to fight the Chihuahua for the bed.  Sweet dreams in your REM sleep. 

Read Full Post »

No circle, no answer, just a lack of logic

Brown County decided to give the kids the day off , from school, for Martin Luther King, Jr., day.  Apparently, we have not used up our snow day allotment, so JCountry is sound asleep, where he prefers to be at 10 a.m.  He is one of those kids who does well on the two-hour delay days, but not so well when he has to catch a bus at 7:30 a.m.

Not to give away my age or anything, but I was a teen in the 60s.  I still have a copy of my letter from President Eisenhower in response to my complaint that it is just stupid that people hated other people because of the color of their skin and he needed to do something about it.  I’m sure I was very polite though, as children of the 50’s were always very polite.  Sometimes, overly polite, like Eddie Haskell polite.  And, if you don’t know who Eddie Haskell is, well, I guess you weren’t there. 

I attended a fairly large school, address Gary, Indiana, called Calumet High School.  I do not know what the facts or figures are, but it ranged from Doctor’s children to children who barely had a home.  It also had a good number of African Americans and Latinos.  This is unlike the school JCountry attends, which (I am guessing here) has less than five non-Anglos in attendance.

My lab partner was an African American girl and I will never forget the day I sat down at our lab table and looked over to see her, head on crossed arms, crying.  That was the first I knew that we were going to have riots.  She told me that some of the kids hated her because she was black.  I was appalled.  I mean, out of all the things in life that you have a choice of, the color of your skin is not one of them.  I comforted her, as best as someone who has not walked in her skin could.

At lunch, I was hit and yelled at by a black student, who I did not know.  By the time we went home on the bus, school was closed.  I think we had three days off to let things settle down and probably let the teacher’s regroup.

I have never understood how people can hold so much hate in their hearts as to hate another person for such a dumb reason.  Nor, how the same people who honor and revere someone like Michael Jordan, can turn around and hate everyone else whose skin is darker than theirs.  

This blog post does not circle back around to the opening.  It has no answers for the question.  I wish I did.  I have learned though, that you cannot change people’s minds much.  If they want to hate someone because they are black, they will.  If they want to hate their President, they will.  If they want to believe every stupid rumor they will.  I just wonder — what can make a person learn to think for themselves and not believe every stupid rumor they hear, no matter how illogical it is.

Read Full Post »

Crazy Aunt Purl, Karma and Road Signs.

Every time something bad would happen, when I was a girl and mostly in school, I would come home and complain to mom and she would tell me, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” 

Frankly, it did not make me feel one whit better.  Not one.  And, I mumbled all evening about a God who has nothing better to do than to screw up my life.  Couldn’t he feed one of those starving children that I was so diligently cleaning my plate for, to make sure they got enough to eat?

There was another premise that did not make a lot of sense to me.  It went right along with how much protection I thought I got hiding under my wooden desk from an atomic bomb attack. 

While attending Casper College, in Casper, Wyoming, I studied under and with Lynn Munns.  Lynn became a great friend and fantastic mentor and, excuse me if you have heard this before.  I used to just not “get” modern art but something made it all snap into place for me and Lynn made the statement about this phenomena, that you may see or hear something a thousand times but you need to be in just the right place for it to snap into place.  He was so right.

Which was just a huge, no humongous build up to a very small story.  I was reminded of it by scratches on a scrap of paper but I read Crazy Aunt Purl = via Crazy Aunt Purl,  titled: You Got My Attention with your Big Orange Sticker and finally remembered to blog the story.  Check it out.

The poor State of Indiana got my attention, but it was with a small paper orange sticker, stuck ceremoniously on top of a sign warning travelers, going probably 50 mph, of upcoming road construction.  Some states have huge bright lights that shine in your eyes.  Others flashing, spinning orange ones.  Indiana had taken three post-it notes and mounted them on a wire above the sign.  The orange notes spun around the wire and made a truly impressive warning sign.  NOT!

Guess, God and construction workers work in mysterious ways, or I just was not in the right place to see the brilliance of it all.

Read Full Post »