Windy

This tree is causing me a bit of anxiety this morning. We are having unusually warm weather and right now the wind is gusting to 33 mph. That is not much, but when I had the dogs out a bit ago, this tree was swaying and rocking back and forth. It is huge. My house is not far from it.

I won't look at you!

My dogs turn away when I snap their picture. I don't use flash but maybe once or twice the flash fired inside and they remember how that hurt their eyes. This is the best I got, most of the time his head was completely turned to one side or the other. I can see his eyes peeking at me, though. This is Slade the boxer.

He loves it when I say "I see you peeking!" He gets all excited and jumps up and down and wiggles. Yes, he is a wiggler.

We still like to pretend to guess what his name originally may have been. A few months ago I thought it may have made more sense to call him Hercules or "Herc" for short. It didn't stick. I mean after two years or so you just can't change their name.

Like every pet owner, we give our pets a name, but have many or at least one nickname for them. Cheech comes in at Cheesy, Cheesecake, and Chester Copperpot. Chong comes in with Chubs, Chubby Checker and Chompers. I tried Chunk (with Chester Copperpot - remember The Goonies?) but it didn't stick.

Slade comes in with Sleigh Bell, Slady, Slady Bug, Toady Frog (from a friend of my daughter's) and my daughter calls him the ugliest dog she has ever seen (Butt Face).  

Sable gets Sable Lee, Sablelicious and of course 'Sable, Sable the coffee table'. She used to get "Schwebel Sable" because she would eat loaves of bread if I left them too close to the edge of the kitchen counter. A bread box solved that problem. I have no idea how Schwebel is pronounced but I rhyme it with Sable. She also gets "Old girl", "Baby girl" and "Poky Little Puppy".

Since the kids were gone this week-end, I got to enjoy a movie of MY choice. I had spent over six hours straight with a technician going over OpenSUSE and Ubuntu Linux commands and my head was swimming and spinning. It was hurting (not bad, Advil took care of it for the most part). It was too warm in the room and he kept having to deal with his own network problems and nothing was going right. We were stymied at almost every step. It was very frustrating.

If anybody has migraines or knows of anybody who suffers the occasional migraine then you have probably heard of the aura. Due to my perimenopause, I am experiencing the aura phase of my migraines. (my personal diagnosis - not my doctor's). Yesterday I had one without the migraine progressing into a headache. I try to just ride them out. It was difficult speaking to the technician and working on the computer, trying this and trying that, while this blinding light and geometric shapes danced and flashed in front of my eyes for an hour. The condition usually makes me physically ill, but it didn't turn out so bad this time. I was a bit (what I call) spacey. Thank goodness my speech did not get garbled like this poor lady who was reporting live on the air during an episode.

I chose to watch "Conviction" with H Swank and S Rockwell. It was a good movie. I was depleted mentally and was just in the mood for this one, which happened to be based on a true story. Not a Swank fan, but I love Rockwell. I never like anything that Driver is in. (Sorry, I just don't get her). I have never been a fan of Lewis, but she was great in this movie. I love it when actors portray a real-life ugly character like this. To be fair, I've really only seen two of her movies (What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Cape Fear). - so I don't have much exposure to her. I just thought she did a wonderful job in this one.

Street Gang

I was out early the other morning - I think about 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. with my dogs outside. I saw them. I had not seen that many in our neighborhood before. They were traveling in a group of five or six. I guess they like the old adage 'power in numbers'.  

As soon as I saw them, I tried to hide. And, I tried to get my dogs back to the side of our house where they couldn't see them. They were quiet, moving eerily through the neighbor's yard. They all wore the same coat, could be some kind of gang thing.

They saw me, but didn't say or do anything. They just silently walked under the street light. I could not tell if there was a leader, or if they just walked along as a group following each other.

A few years ago, when I first moved into this neighborhood, I would have been shocked to see them. I guess. I had never seen them up close before, just from a distance when I would travel to other parts of the county. Were they branching out? Did they need more territory? I don't know. A few years ago, I would have been a bit in awe of them.

I guess I was still in awe. But now there is fear there, too. Especially for my dogs. I understand that I don't own the neighborhood but I didn't like to see them so close to my home. I wanted to yell at them to go back where they belong. Yelling out at that time of the morning may not have been a good idea. I have no idea how they would have reacted to my outburst, anyway.

I went back inside the house and waited about thirty minutes before taking the dogs out again to do their business. I wanted to make sure the gang was gone. One of their kind is the reason I am driving a different car today. I hit one of them with my Civic in December of 2009. He ended up dead alongside the road. My Civic was totaled. I loved that car. You can read about that episode here.

Color in the bleak

My newspaper gets delivered in pretty blue plastic on days that it rains or snows. One day they wrapped it in orange plastic. I tied it to my dogwood tree to add some color to the bleak winter. I have about four blue plastic bows on the tree, also. Tacky nut that I am.

Running and Playing

We got walloped with a lot of snow here in Ohio. Here is Slade enjoying the snowfall at the very beginning of the fall out. It snowed for a long time and if I had to guess - I would say well over six inches to maybe more. I am not a good guesser in that area. All schools in the area are closed. That means an extended week-end for me. I do monitor e-mail and the helpdesk from  home. In case there are some schools in session (there are not). More for the Admin. personnel who do go into the office today. Not all school employees stay home on a snow day.

I had a very busy (in a good way) week-end. Many people and a lot of food was involved. I watched The Expendables for about the third time. Here is a funny drink menu from the event. All of us were very disappointed in the way the movie portrayed Li. We think he is awesome and they made him look like a wimp in this movie. He was sadly missing from the photo events I looked at.

Don't look for Willis and Schwarzy very much in this movie. They make a very small, tiny appearance. We did love the humor in the short scene, though! That was A+. There is one thing we ALL agreed on. The gun that Crews uses. We ALL want one of those! LOL!

Video here  and   here    .

Prince Caspian?

No. My daughter - again.
See the movie image here.

Goofy fun

A while back I downloaded a free app to my cell phone called Fun pics. You choose a picture (they have the face cut out) - aim your camera at your subject, line their face up in the little area and click. I have about a dozen of these with different characters. This one is my daughter in the infamous Yoda character.

Nugget

I remember these. Little nuggets of gum. I loved 'em. 

I am so-o-o tired. I can't stay focused. I have been either working on a computer or in a computer all day today. My hands are all scratched up and nicked up. Like a Saturday mechanic with busted knuckles. I am brain dead. Time to go and find a pillow. Especially since I have to keep backspacing over my misspelled words and re-type them.

Oh, hey. Has anybody out there ever worked with vi editor? Ain't it a bitch? I don't have to use it much anymore and I forget from one time to the next what the commands are.  I need to read THIS tutorial before I work in it the next time. Yes, there are easier editing tools, but I could not load them until I changed two files on the Ubuntu box and to do that without gedit or any other easy editor, I had to resort to vi. Good grief! I mean, just take a look at the guy who wrote it!

Where's the GUI?

The picture looks better in a negative format. Isn't this how everybody spends their Sundays? Ha, just kidding. For you , I mean. Not me. This is how I spent mine -  in between washing loads of clothes.

Funny thing is, way back in the early 90's I cringed at Windows with the GUI interface, and now I struggle to work without one. I'd say it was a pretty good day of  learning me something. I just hope I can continue the pace and at least look a little bit like I know what I am doing come March 16th.

Genus

I was born in 1960. There would be no more babies in the family until my eldest sister had her first child in early 1972. I was 12 and just enamored with my nephew. Every few years we would be blessed with another baby in the family as sisters and brothers married and had children.

I, the youngest of the siblings had my daughter in 1991. (My sister had a daughter in 1992 but we saw very, very little of her and she is autistic). The dry spell hit. No more babies.

Until 2005 when the next generation began having them. They started slow but appear to be picking up  momentum. The wife of my eldest nephew (the one mentioned above born in 1972) announced her good news at a family gathering last night.

When I came home, I turned the TV on to relax a bit before going to bed. What would be on, but "Gone With the Wind".  "The happiest days are when babies come!" - Melanie Wilkes.

35 days

Why, oh why did I do this to myself? Am I sick? Am I psycho? I volunteered to present a session on setting up Ubuntu Server. I get 45 minutes. 45 minutes on a subject I know very little about. In 35 days.

It all began a few weeks ago. I was feeling really good back then, remember? I didn't have this stupid bug that I am STILL dealing with. Anyway, management asked for ideas and volunteers. I agreed to my usual subject (the filter) - two sessions. Walk in the park. Then I had the brainiac idea to suggest that I would do a Linux server setup. I have had a Linux web page running for over four years.

Sigh. That is on a Mandriva. I agreed to go Ubuntu because that seems to be the People's Choice. I'll do the best I can and hope for some forgiving audience members. I may have a gentleman help me from a school district but he is super busy and super Linux savvy. That would take a lot of the burden off, but he may have to back out and I completely understand. In the mean time, I have no less than four Linux books and I have my nose and I have heard about the proverbial grindstone. So, flu.... back off! I got me a learning curve to climb.

Movie - spoiler alert. If you have not seen the movie RED and plan to, please stop reading here. I plan to spoil some of the storyline. Sorry. RED is an acronym for Retired, Extremely Dangerous. I wondered what the title would mean in the movie. There you have it.

I am by no means a movie critic. The following are my own opinions and can vary from week to week, day to day depending on my mood when I watch the movie. For example, I watched Date Night a few weeks ago and hated it, but when I watched it again with my daughter we laughed our heads off. Most of the complaints that I have are aimed more at the director of the movie than the actor themselves. A lot of times I just feel that the actor was miscast and does a perfectly wonderful job in other movies. I don't like inconsistencies and I really hate writers/directors who have not done their research. Like when they put a 60's style hair style in a late 1880 western!

Things I liked:  I KNEW that was R Dreyfuss playing a very bad guy. I had no idea he was in the movie. I only knew that B Willis and H Mirren were in the movie when I rented it. I would probably watch any movie Mirren was in ever since White Nights. (If you never caught this one, it is a good one). Going through her list of movies I realize how little I have seen of her. Shame on me!

I also liked B Cox as Ivan; and Malkovich (the parts that I did like) with his quirkiness.

The parts I did NOT like, and this list is much longer. Sigh.

I am sick, sick, sick of  B Willis. Sorry. He plays the same tight-smiling goof in every movie, I swear. Does he have teeth? Bring back movies like The Sixth Sense!  I am sick of the violence. The blood, the beatings, the breaking glass. I get the picture. Shove his head into the wall and move on. Can you add some comedy to the violence? Anything to lighten it up a little? Good grief!

And wait a minute. Does anybody even LIKE M Parker? I watched Weeds once or twice. No, thanks. If somebody drugged me and put me in a car in New Orleans and I woke up looking at the New York City skyline, my first words would NOT be "Why are we in New York?"  My first words would be "Pull this damn car over, I gotta pee!" WTF?

And sorry, sister. There was no obvious chemistry between yourself and Willis. It was like two wooden mannequins kissing. Not convincing and in fact made me uncomfortable to watch the two of you together. What the heck is up with your red nose? Are you snorting constantly? Or, did you have a serious cold during the filming? Couldn't the make-up department do something with that? Good grief!

I thought that Mirren getting shot and limping around was a bit sissy for her hard-core character she had been playing. Doubled over in pain like that, I figure she would have been used to pain in her line of work.  Willis walked around for a while with his bullet wound. Why do they make the woman look like a pansy? 

And why in the heck would Malkovich's character leave her? They don't do that. Nobody leaves a comrade behind! Nobody! I know, I know - it was so Ivan could save her. It did not make Malkovich's character likable anymore to me.

The part that really ticked me off?! They brought him back once, why couldn't they bring him back again!? I have the blu-ray version of the movie, I will search for another ending and maybe that storyline will be different. M Freeman's character. I know he didn't want to stay in a retirement home anymore, but he looked to me like he could pretty much fend for himself. I think they could have written a new line into his life at the end. They seemed to slough his death off as "oh, well. Somebody had to die."  Bring him back at the end! We were all expecting it! Or, maybe that is why they didn't.

Food

I love food. I had always wanted to go to the above restaurant and finally got my wish in December. I scored a menu from the waiter. Nothing special. Seems they give them out all the time. Not only does it have the menu, it has a few advertisements in it as well.

Food is not my friend this week. It is the last thing I want to see or think of. I can barely tolerate jell-o or boiled potatoes. Two things I have eaten since the super bowl. Good game! It began with an earache and a stomach ache during the game. I never want to see any of the food I fixed that night for a very, very long time!

Oh, and toast. I managed toast today. I know you are supposed to eat it dry, but please! My stomach sounds like a ... well, I'm not really sure what to compare it to. I think you get the picture. And, it isn't because I am hungry, you can take my word for that!

So, I have been off work, taking it easy, hating food, drinking a ton of ice water and a wee bit of Pedialyte. Gross stuff, but I thought it was heaven when I was first able to drink something Monday morning. The positive spin on all of this? The kids had this bug two weeks ago, so the house was still full of sherbet, jell-o, Pedialyte, applesauce, bananas. I really thought I was out of the woods, but ha! No! I just hope my niece does not get it. She sat on the couch with me during the game. She has like four exams this week. Ugh!

Taffy? No thanks!

I think when I tried this one it was in the strawberry flavor. I didn't like hard candy. It hurt my teeth. Still does. This Turkish Taffy in vanilla - you have to wonder. How old is it? Does taffy even have an expiration date?

Poor baby!

Well, he seemed to have liked the snowfall at first. It was coming down fast and in huge flakes. I could tell it was turning to rain quickly because of the weight of it and the sound it was making. My poor baby was ready to go in after a few minutes out in this stuff. Snow he will tolerate, rain - hell no! He thinks he will melt.

Had a big family get together Friday evening at the Olive Garden. 18 of us. They put us at a long table. Folks at the other end of the long table may as well have been in another restaurant. This won't work! We could not visit. You could not get up to go and visit because for one thing, there were no extra chairs. Another - there was no room to walk between our long table and the other patrons because the servers needed that thin aisle to keep delivering food and drinks. Sigh. There must be another way to get family together and still be able to talk to those  you don't see very often.

Watching the SB at  home tonight. About six of us. That suits me. A few snacks and we will be ready to roll. Oh...the kids talked me into putting the Kinect onto my T.V. in the living room. They did the Dance Central. We laughed SO hard. I had no idea it was recording everything and we laughed even harder when we saw the dancers performing. Oh, it was great. I might get to watch the SB, I may have to hide the sensor for the game. :)

I could eat this one all day

I do not recall having this candy when I was young. I do not recall the first time I had sixlets. I could eat this candy all day along with plain m&m's. 

Remember during Christmas I said that I despised the song "Santa Baby"? Well, I sure set something into my brain that is going to haunt me for a long time. About the same time as Christmas music was playing everywhere I began the ritual of giving Sable her medicine and like Pavlov's dogs, I associated the meds with a jingle.

In a day of complete insanity I sang the jingle to the tune of Santa Baby. What was I thinking?! Here are the words (to the tune of the despised infamous Christmas song):

Sable Baby
Come and get your medicine

Oh, yeah!

You know you need your medicine.

Sable Baby,
Come and get your medicine, now!

I don't know if I will ever get this jingle out of my head as I give her the medicine daily. God help me.

I give Sable two tablets of Novox (carprofen)  100 mg and two Phycox softchews. All the dogs get a tiny piece of bread and peanut butter (sticky enough to hold the pill  to the bread until she swallows it). The other dogs do not get any medicine. I implore you to try this medication if your dog is showing signs of arthritis. Sable could barely get up from the floor where she was laying and now she runs with the pups. It is so wonderful to see her having fun outside. The medicine was first prescribed by my veterinarian, but I chose to order the medication on-line after that. I chose VetDepot. When you go to order the product, they ask you for the name of your veterinarian and they do the contacting and getting the okay (because it is prescription) and once all is clear, they ship it to you. For the Phycox softchews you do not need a prescription.

Sky Bar

I loved this candy bar. I have not seen it around but I wonder if it is still manufactured. Well, Wikipedia to the rescue! It is still produced but hard to find. I need to visit a Cracker Barrel.

Chewed up pen

This was NOT in my 60's fun box. That would just be gross. I'm back but too tired and cranky to put in much effort. I have to save it for work anyway. Ink pens are cheaper than dog chewy bones, so I may just start getting these for the dogs. What do you think? My living room carpet is blue so the ink would at least match the color, just a different shade. Of course PETA may not be very pleased with me.

I returned home to ice. My yard/sidewalk/driveway is solid ice. I had salt in the garage - that took care of the sidewalk. Dogs are kind of funny on ice. If I had any energy or any co-ordination while walking on ice, I would totally videotape them and post it. Dogs on ice.

Huh?

I swear to God I thought they had put a condom in the box from my 60's fun. I had never seen this candy before, but really. Doesn't it look like a condom package at first glance?

Fruit Stripes

Loved this gum. You can still buy it. Yum!