Happy New Year!!

And To All A Good Night

How Novel

I stole this (with the best of intentions) from a blog I read often. I'm not sure how accurate it is but it's a new twist anyway.

You're Loosely Based!

by Storey Clayton

While most people haven't heard of you, you're a really good and
interesting person. Rather clever and witty, you crack a lot of jokes about the world
around you. You do have a serious side, however, where your interest covers the homeless
and the inequalities of society. You're good at bringing people together, but they keep
asking you what your name means.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

You Can Pick Your Friends And You Can Pick Your Nose But You Can't Pick The Right Line

Tonight I went to Walmart, which is one of my least favorite things to do in the best of times. Six days before Christmas doesn't fall into that category. The store really wasn't so bad---wasn't too terribly crowded really--considering--and I was only there for a couple of items. Things were going decently UNTIL: I got in line. I stink at picking lines; I just stink at it. All lines being equal, or seemingly not too unequal, I picked one. Line number 14. After maybe five minutes, I noticed that I hadn't moved at all, while the people who had just been on either side of me in the other lines were forward by several people. Twenty minutes passed and I inched forward. First of all, there had only been maybe eight parties in front of me (several of these included four or more people) and except for the girl directly in front of me, none of them seemed to have abnormally large transactions. So there was nothing to indicate that it would be a slow line. I don't know if there was something wrong with the checker or if each person who came up had some unique problem; I don't know what the issue was, but I stood in line for probably 45 minutes. Meanwhile, dozens of people passed through the lines on each side of me. It was lovely to see; it just gave my heart cheer.

And then the final insult: the girl in front of me with her possibly 100 items finally got everything rung up. She was apparently purchasing things for her uncle or for the group of them, using her uncle's card. She did the whole card thing, but wait!! It was the wrong PIN! Nothing worked. The machine wouldn't let her do credit. She called her uncle or someone and tried a different PIN. No luck. Meanwhile, as it often does, time passed. My children grew older. We got a new president. Finally, it was decided that she would have to put her cart and all its goodies aside and run home, get a different card, and come back. MY TURN!!! Already? So quickly? I took about five minutes or less and was out the door, quick as a flash. I shook the dust of Walmart from my feet and went merrily on my way.

But I'm left wondering if there's some mathematical system or possibly some magic I can come up with for helping me pick better lines.

There's Something Wrong With This Picture

In Bossier City, Louisiana, a pit bull puppy chewed off the toes of an infant child. The child is now a ward of the state or some such thing because of parental neglect/desertion (apparently the parents were sleeping nearby while this happened). The part that amazes me the most is that the public interest there and concern seem to be primarily for the DOG, not the BABY WHO'S HAD TOES CHEWED OFF. I can't figure that out. What is wrong with people?

What's Going On?

Why won't blogger let me leave comments on any blogs anymore? Do I really have to update to beta in order to leave comments now? What if I don't want to? Help.

Once Upon A Time

there was a young girl who lived with her mother, her father, her brother, and a whole bunch of chickens. Every day she would help collect the eggs, which was always a lesson in self-defense and the odds of luck vs. skill. One of the chickens out of the bunch became her pet and he followed her all around, kind of like Mary's lamb or Fern's Wilbur. She called him Hickety-Pickety. They were good buddies.

BUT came the day that it was time for chickens to head to the butcher. Don't ask me why. It's not like this was a farm in the middle of nowhere and the family had to live off the chickens. But at any rate, it was chicken harvest time and the young girl was incensed that Hickety-Pickety was headed for the gallows as well. His being a friend of the family didn't seem to give him amnesty. I don't know if there were tears or not---I scarce remember--but one thing was determined: the girl vowed never to eat her old friend Hickety-Pickety. Her parents complied and they carefully wrote Hickety's name on the outside of the butcher paper. Being 10, it made perfect sense that a chicken went directly from the hand of the butcher to its stiff white paper prison. It never occurred to her, apparently, that there'd be no way to keep track of one dead chicken from another.

Months passed. Whenever chicken was served, the girl sped to the freezer, flung open the door and confirmed that Hickety was still safely wrapped and stored, spared from knife and fork, at least, if not from the indignity of an unheroic death.

I don't know what finally prompted the girl to one day check the contents of the Hickety package. Imagine her horror when she realized it was empty....just a white, paper shell with the words "Hickety-Pickety" now nothing but a mockery. Talk about shock! Oh, the agony! She'd been hoodwinked AND she'd broken her promise.

I wonder if that was a defining moment. If it had any lasting impact. I don't know how she finally reconciled the"damage" done. Perhaps the pain of the discovery lingered and festered for awhile; maybe she forgot about it by the following week. I guess it couldn't have been too horrible an aftermath since I don't really remember it; the trauma must've been minor or else I blocked it from my mind. Maybe that's what's wrong with me??

At any rate, it was an early important lesson about life: what's on the outside isn't necessarily indicative of what's on the inside.

A Rude Awakening

Because of sleep apnea, I'm supposed to sleep with a machine. I've had little luck in finding a mask that works (for those of you with sleep apnea, you know what I mean; if you don't, it's too boring to go into). Needless to say, I don't get great sleep, like I've mentioned before. Well, now that I have this never-ending cough and cold, I can't use the mask anyway and so I'm getting little sleep between the coughing and the oxygen deprivation. Sometimes I feel like I hover all night just on the edges of sleep; other times I feel like I'm unconscious and have no memory of anything in the times that I'm asleep. It was this kind of unconscious sleep I was in the other night, apparently, when I had the rudest of awakenings. While asleep, I must've decided I needed a drink of water, but at some point from the side table to my mouth, my brain must've fallen back asleep and forgotten about the whole drink thing. This is my guess. Because the next thing I know, I'm leaping out of bed, drenched in water, with a fairly small lake gathering underneath me. I was holding the empty glass, so I couldn't really blame it on anyone else. I yelped a warning to my husband and we gathered up the bedding and were able to get it up before the lake hit the mattress. I was fairly soaked and the bedding was a goner, so we got to change the sheets in the middle of the night. Such fun.

Now when I go to sleep, I eye my glass of water suspiciously, I check to make sure there are no sharp objects near me---nothing that could unknowingly become a weapon or something---and I wonder what the night will bring.

No End In Sight

I recently read on someone's blog that their cold/cough thing lasted a month (and still going, I think). Are you kidding me?? Mine still hasn't gone away and doesn't seem to be in any hurry to, but a month? In a month I'll weigh about a million pounds from lack of exercise, which won't really matter because I'll be dead from lack of sleep. Sheez.

Everywhere I go, I'm offered a remedy. Yesterday I heard, "eat the rind of a lime. It'll go away faster." Is this for real? I'm so sick of coughing, I just might try it. But I have my doubts. Does anything actually work?

Because We Like A Happy Ending

There's been a story in the news recently of a family, The Kims, from San Francisco who went missing after Thanksgiving. Most of you have probably read or seen news reports regarding this. They were traveling from Seattle, down through Oregon, coming home to San Francisco. The wife and two small children were found, but the husband---who had set out on foot through rugged Oregon wilderness looking for help---remained missing for two more days. They found his body about an hour ago. I was surprised by how sad and utterly disappointed I was when the news broke. It seems that there was a lot of emotion invested in the search mission which has now become, sadly, a recovery operation. Even the undersheriff, while making the announcement, broke down.

What seems to make this story even sadder is that, in hindsight, there's the realization that Mr. Kim would be safe now had he NOT tried to find help. And yet, do you just wait for your whole family to die? I'm sure he felt that he had to do something. They'd already been stranded for four days before he left. Heartbreaking.

How is it that we sometimes become instantly attached to some news stories? We hold our breath and hope for good news. We anxiously wait to hear updates. We feel like we're part of it, even though we might be hundreds of miles away. Maybe this one seemed more gripping because the family lives nearby. The members of this family were total strangers and yet, through news stories, etc., they became real and familiar. I guess it's just that we like when the unlikely happens. We want heroes, we want the odds to be beaten, we want a happy ending.

Crocs Are Like Hawaii

If that didn't make sense, let me explain:

Everyone always raves about Hawaii, right? So, years ago in my teenage perverseness or whatever, I decided "Who cares about Hawaii?" How great could it be? Sure, pictures I'd seen showed a pretty piece of the earth, but there are lots of those. So I never had a desire to go to Hawaii, and I never understood why it was such a big deal.....Until I actually went there. I hated to jump on the bandwagon, but I couldn't help it. Hawaii was gorgeous and fun and relaxing and one of the most beautiful places I've still ever seen (granted, I haven't seen TOO many places, but I'd still wager it's one of the prettiest).

So then Crocs. Crocs are a fairly recent rage in the shoe industry. Everybody has been babbling about how great Crocs are, how comfortable, how their kids just have to have them. So I didn't feel any interest really in getting the shoe that everyone else is wearing, though I was curious what made them so great. They looked like they had the potential to be comfortable, alright, but having the latest fad didn't appeal to me so much....until I actually wore them. While I was in Colorado a few weeks ago, I saw that my friend had some so I just had to see what the big deal was. And they are so comfortable!! Way more so than I expected. So that Croc bandwagon going by? You'll see me on it. (And my friend also convinced me to try Dansko shoes---I'm a convert, even though they're on the spendy side. My feet used to always hurt, no matter what shoe I got. Now, thanks to my friend and her pointing me in the direction of Crocs and Dansko, my feet feel good for the first time in ages.)

So in case you still don't see how Crocs are like Hawaii, let me just tell ya: they're both worthy of all the hype.

I Have Been Felled

by a vicious, horrible cold...

and cough...

I've been feeling terrible, and it's getting old. I have things I need to do!! I have to get back to the gym!! I'm tired of coughing my lungs out!!

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!