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Weekend Update: 2008-01-06

Dunno what my last journal entry covered, so let me start at the top – we rang in 2008 at the traditional party at Dan and Doug’s, which is always fun and pretty low-key, and thankfully a few blocks away so we don’t have to risk life and limb. I got really toasted, but managed to not have a hangover the next day; pretty excellent. I seem to have made a dozen different resolutions lately; I’ll work on them if I remember them all. The books resolution is firmly cemented and I’m sure I’ll do well on it.

I have a new niece as of January 2nd at 3:42 a.m. My sister Stacy had her baby, named Annabelle. I’m suffering from “Twitter is killing my blogging” or I would have mentioned it before now.

Stacy's baby Annabelle

So I’m an aunt, again. Yay! Stephanie and I decided we’d get the kid started right, so we set up an ING savings account and automated it to deposit $20 ever month. After a couple of years, we’ll look at investing it. Stephanie’s Dad invested the money her family gave to her when she was a baby and she has a nice nest egg because of it, so I thought it would be good to do something similar for my niece.

This weekend we had a really full To Do list, and we managed to get a lot of it done. We put away all the Christmas decorations and finally cleaned up after all the Christmas baking and the tons of cooking we’ve done at home lately. We’ve done really well about making meals at home rather than dining out, but it does have a tendency to trash the kitchen. We got other vacuuming and cleaning done, and I managed to finally package up and get ready to mail some gifts we’ve had around the house since this summer. I completely failed to do my crime watch block leader stuff; I’ll have to get to it soon.

I had a full-blown cold after Christmas that went away, but left some sort of sinus thing in it’s wake that I can’t seem to shake. Dunno what that’s about. On January 18th, I’m going to be getting laser surgery on my eyes to correct my vision. I’ll take a few days off, but I’m not too worried about it. I have a pretty high pain threshold these days. If it doesn’t involve I giant hole in my chest, I’m not bothered.

I’m going to keep track of the movies we watch in 2008, in addition to the books I read. I’ve never really kept track before, but in reconstructing this past year’s list, it’s apparent movies aren’t really a high priority in our house. I can recall seeing 24 movies, and only 6 of them were in the theater. The bulk of our movie watching was on Netflix. I’ll reconstruct the list in another post.

This weekend we got the movie Madeline from Netflix and watched it. It’s a live-action version of the children’s book that Stephanie adored as a kid, so it’s been in our queue. It was cute but the story didn’t flow well, and we spent the whole movie analyzing what plot points came from the books. However I have had the Carly Simon theme song stuck in my head all morning, so it made some sort of impression.

I’m currently in the middle of reading The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books by J. Peder Zane (a present from Stephanie’s Mom) and The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, which was a present from my friend Jen.

I’ve also been playing several different video games from bigfishgames.com. We had a coupon for free downloads with a Barnes and Noble purchase, and after playing their version of Mahjongg, I started looking at some of their other games, including Madame Fate, Mystery Case Files – Huntsville, and Mystery Case Files – Ravenhurst. They’re basically scavenger hunt-like games, where you poke around rooms and find missing items. I find them a lot more fun than war games and blowing up crap, though.

Continue ReadingWeekend Update: 2008-01-06

Wow – busy time

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Long time, no bloggy. Hmmm.
Went to our traditional Thanksgiving trip; Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Iowa with the extended Mineart family. Almost everyone was there – something like 48 family members all in the same house at the same time. Yep. I took lots of photos; most from the trip are up on Flickr.
While we were there, we drove out to Eldon, Iowa to see the little house from the famous Grant Woods painting American Gothic, and took photos of us in front of the house. (Obviously, you can see one of them a few posts down.) I’ve been wanting to do that for years. The house is designated an historic landmark owned by the state of Iowa, and this year the state opened a visitor’s center/museum near the house so you can find out more about the painting and get help getting your picture taken. The proceeds from the center help pay for the maintenance of the house, which is nice. And the volunteers there are pretty fun-loving and enjoy tongue-in-cheek parodies of the painting.
A few years back, I read “American Gothic : The Biography of Grant Wood’s American Masterpiece” so I knew a lot of the background of the painting, but the museum was really interesting, and it makes me want to go back and read it again. Strangely, I know I wrote a review of the book for my blog, but it’s not coming up in my searches. Hmmm.
Speaking of Flickr and photographs, I finished uploading all of the digital photos I have to Flickr. I still have a lot of captioning and tagging to do, but they are in sets in roughly chronological order going backwards to September, 2000 when I bought my first digital camera. I also need to pull significant events into sets, as well, and then embed galleries throughout my site. I have some of that done, but not nearly enough. I had quite a nostalgic time going through all my old photos. And a bit of a sad time, too, coming across photos of our friend Joe. I have more of him I haven’t added to that set, but I stopped hunting for them after awhile because it made me too unhappy. I’ll have to complete that task later.

Continue ReadingWow – busy time

Colonoscopy Fun

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So…… tomorrow I have to have a Colonoscopy. Woohoo! No, Katie Couric will not be there to film it. And yes, I am old. OLD. Just yesterday I was reminiscing about something that happened in college in 1987 – twenty years ago.

a) I’m reminiscing now? Great. People just love that.
b) I still think I’m a college student. I still have that “final in a class I forgot I signed up for and never attended” dream regularly. That counts, right?
c) TWENTY FRICKIN’ YEARS AGO? OMFG.

This is a follow-up thing from my diverticulitis problem back in May. It’s mainly a precaution to ensure I don’t have colon cancer or polyps. Both are unlikely, given my age, but they want to shine a light up there to be sure.

So today I’m not allowed to eat anything but non-red jello (something about the dye) and clear liquids, and tonight I have to “prep” for the procedure. Not going into details; use your imagination for that. As I was leaving the pharmacy this morning after filling the appropriate prescription, the guy actually said “have a good day!” and then remembered what drugs I had just purchased and giggled. Funny guy.

I was going to add a funny picture to this post, but I made the mistake of searching the word colonoscopy on google images. Don’t do that. Instead, I’ll provide you with the obligatory unicorn chaser:

Mandala Unicorn
Mandala Unicorn
2022-03-17 Update:
In 2007 I was 39. Yeah. That was 15 years ago. So I’ve been out of college for 35 years. Yikes.
Continue ReadingColonoscopy Fun

Writing? What me? I never do that any more…

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It’s been a while since I’ve sat down to write a real journal entry – since we arrived home from our trip, actually. I spent a lot of time organizing my trip photos, and working on a site design for one of my friends. Most of my day to day updates end up on twitter, and I’ve been so busy at work and playing so much catch-up on my blog reading that I haven’t had a chance to write much. I’ve eliminated numerous blogs from my feed reader because I just can’t keep up any more.
I’m so far behind writing little reviews of what I’ve read. I have a stack of 8 books I’ve finished and need to write about, and a giant stack of books from the library to read. I may end up doing a short post where I list the books I’ve read without actually reviewing them, because I get really bogged down and don’t have the time for it.
I’ve been buying loads of cheap crap on eBay – I’ve had an art project stewing in my brain ever since we visited Earl and Syd’s house on the trip, and I want to work on it.
Our vegetable garden seems to have done well for a first attempt. We had a bumper crop of cucumbers and have been giving them away. A few sugar snap peas. The lettuce came in fairly well early, and we had a decent crop of radishes. We learned some good stuff, too – cucumbers need a lot more room, for one thing. Next year we’ll have a little better organization, and I think we’ll do even better.
Did I mention my sister is going to have a baby? I know I talked about it on Twitter. It’s very exciting – we’re going to have a little British niece or nephew. Aren’t aunts and uncles a huge thing in English children’s literature? I expect to be a character in our own Chronicles of Narnia any day now. “Then Charlie’s lesbian aunts flew in from America…”
We have our regular work-sponsored “Fast Friday” at the track today – this year we’re doing it for the NASCAR race here on the Indy track. Because I’m obviously such a huge NASCAR fan. Right. I did enjoy Talladega Nights, though, and more recently – Cars, which we finally saw after being laughed at repeatedly the entire time by all the other drivers on our road trip. (You haven’t seen CARS? That restaurant was in CARS! Hey look, we’re in front of the gas station from CARS! It didn’t help that the movie painstakingly included lots and lots of attractions from Route 66 to support the historic restoration efforts.)
The whole “going to the track” thing is really wasted on me, though. It’s too bad I can’t trade out with some of the guys from our road trip; they love the race cars and asked all about living near the Indy 500. I didn’t tell them that I regularly turn down tickets to the race every year (my dad has had them since I was a little kid) and even sort of avoid the west side of town when there’s a race on. I did mention you can hear the cars from our house though. That’s true of most of city, though – the noise really carries. Anyways, I better go get ready; I’m carpooling to the track with Rich…

Continue ReadingWriting? What me? I never do that any more…

What I got for my Birthday by Steph Mineart

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So, I’m 3×13! Yay!

From my Dad, I got $100 – which I promptly used to by a pair of Crocs, and the rest I put in the bank for our trip.

From Elizabeth I got “The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World” – a book that some blogs have referred to as “library porn” because of the gorgeous photos.

And the DVD of V for Vendetta – which is awesome, because I LOVED that movie, although if you see me creeping about town wearing a goofy mask, you should probably start to worry.

From Doug and Eric, I got a gift certificate to Kohl’s – which is excellent, ’cause I really need some new pants. Not that that’s the only thing you get at Kohls, or anything, but I really need some pants.

Lori got me magic kits and a flying toy monkey from that screams and everything. He wears a little cape and flying hat. He’s already snuggled in with the rest of the monkey clan, making new friends. They’re all arguing about who gets to go to Roswell with us.

From Jen, I got “The Dangerous Book for Boys” by Conn Iggulden – which I really, really wanted, although I’m not a boy. That just means it won’t be dangerous for me, right? I’m thinking I’ll learn a lot of stuff to teach to Sam when he gets bigger. And won’t his mom appreciate that?

From Dan and Doug, I got the The Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition) DVD, which completes my set, thankfully, because I already had the first two! This means I’m in danger of having an all day Lord of Rings pajama party some Saturday. Stephanie will love it; she’ll sleep through the whole thing.

And Rachel gave me A Major Award.

From my sweetheart I got:

  • 3 pairs of shorts
  • 6 t-shirts
  • Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason“
  • The complete, restored, annotated edition of “Huckleberry Finn” – (which I’ve raved about wanting)
  • Season 2 of Veronica Mars on DVD
  • A lawn-care book called “The Perfect Indiana Lawn” but I call it “How to become Lawn Guy” who is the neighbor at Stephanie’s old house, who I idolize because he has, well, The Perfect Indiana Lawn.
  • A remote control VW Microbus
  • And a Bike! (yay!) – I’ve been wanting to ride around the neighborhood taking pictures.

Also, Stephanie made me my favoritest pudding cake.

I am lucky to have such great loved ones…

Old Spaghetti Factory wasn’t half bad – I haven’t been there in years, so when we were spinning the roulette wheel of “places to eat downtown” (what, you don’t have one of those at your house?) and that came up, we said “hey, let’s try it.” It was a bit warm in the restaurant. But the olive appetizer was tasty, as was the spinach & cheese ravioli. And our waiter said he’d see us at downtown tomorrow! Gee, I wonder what he meant.

Continue ReadingWhat I got for my Birthday by Steph Mineart

Weekend Update 2007-06-03

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We went to Woodruff Place Flea Market yesterday, and only got done with middle drive before I pooped out because I was hot and tired. It was also kind of a pain with Spike. I’ve taken him to it before, but it was far more crowded this time, so I had to think about him all the time, which was very distracting.
We found a loveseat, though, for $30 for the library. After bringing that home and installing it in the library, I took a nap, and Stephanie went grocery shopping. Then we cooked out hamburgers and turkey burgers and sausages, and I mowed, because it looked like rain. Then I did a bunch of work on my route 66 music mix, and hung out looking at the internets and watching crappy movies on the romance channel.
Today, I have a list of stuff to do, but I’m still kinda tired for some reason, so I don’t know how much of it I’ll get to.
I’d like to point out that my birthday is Wednesday, and I’ll be celebrating the occasion sometime on the following weekend, which is also Gay Pride, and the Talbott Street Art Fair. I’m thinking I might plan for a Friday birthday celebration.

Continue ReadingWeekend Update 2007-06-03

Weekend To Dos

  • Taxes – Stephanie is finishing these up. She’s awesome.
  • Hallway painting – I’m painting two walls in the upstairs hallway where the Beetle collectible display shelves will go. This will let us finally unpack and arrange those boxes. we’ve been delaying that unpacking because we didn’t want to have to move the shelves when we got around to the painting.
  • Setting up the new server – yup. As God is my witness, I will never lose music again.
  • Replace the belt on the vacuum cleaner.
  • Take recycling to center.
  • Go to the pet supply store – for food, cat litter, Feliway.
  • Visit our friend Jill’s house.
  • Eat dinner on Sunday with Stephanie’s old skating coach.
  • Thinking about my sister’s dog and my friend’s baby.
Continue ReadingWeekend To Dos