Star Wars!!

Don't ya love this song?

Prince Caspian

We enjoyed seeing Prince Caspian yesterday.My favorite part had to be Reepicheep, but then that's one of my favorite parts of the book tooAnd I also really liked Lucy. Here is Trumpkin. There were some things that one wonders about, like why did they change this or that, but on the whole, I think they did a good job. It's worth seeing again, like maybe next weekend?

Hummingbirds

Don't you think it'd be fun to hand feed hummingbirds? This lady did!

A Palindromic Number

Did you know if you multiply 111,111,111 by 111,111,111, the answer is 12,345,678,987,654,321?

Actually, it's even more delicious than that....

• 1 x 1 = 1
• 11 x 11 = 121
• 111 x 111 = 12321
• 1111 x 1111 = 1234321
• 11111 x 11111 = 123454321
• 111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
• 1111111 x 1111111 = 1234567654321
• 11111111 x 11111111 = 123456787654321
• 111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321

Winter's (hopefully) Last Stand

We had 3 or 4 inches of snow last night, but I can still see the little crocuses.

To quote another, "This is no thaw. This is spring."

It just has to be.

A Pretty Picture

Reminds me of Narnia. You can almost see the lamppost. . .

OK OK OK!!!!

So I'm struggling (a little) (ok a lot!!!) to keep my head above water!!! I've had trouble with photoshop which has made uploading photos very time-consuming, and I came back and hit the ground running at work. AND I'm trying to be faithful to exercise even if it means I don't have time to blog. (AND, Bryan, I'm alternating walking with 1 minute runs on the treadmill. I just can't run longer than 1 minute at 5 mph/hr!) So, one of these days, I'll really update.

Who could resist?

Was it because the little girl was so cute? Or was it just that I have been longing for Thin Mints for, well, ever so long?

I asked her what kind she recommended, knowing full well it did not matter. I was going home with Thin Mints.

The little girl carefully selected 2 boxes. (Fortunately, she did not hear the voices in my head calling out, "TEN boxes!!! TEN boxes!!!") She placed them in a plastic bag, very professionally took my money and gave me change, thanked me, and instructed me to have a nice day. I made it all the way home before I opened the box.

Shower for Heather

Isn't this cake beautiful? The baby blanket is icing on top of saran wrap, so they when they were ready to cut, they just peeled that saran wrap off and lifted the plastic baby. Heather seemed really happy and she got lots and lots of cute baby girl things. All the tables were decorated with pink tulips, very welcome in this never-ending winter! Believe it or not, my name was one drawn, and I got to bring home a vase of pink tulips. Reminds me of all my little Dutch girls.....

A Snow Globe

Today I felt like I was in a snow globe. We have had lovely bands of snow pass over us, sometimes huge flakes floating to the ground, sometimes millions of small flakes being hurled from the sky. I know I live in the Frozen North, and I'm supposed to complain about snow, but I guess I'm just a child of the south. I still marvel at the flakes, and it makes me smile just to look at them.I can't really seem to photograph it, but it was coming down so fast, I just had to try. A flash at least stops the blur. Below, you can see without the flash. The vertical lines are snowflakes all stretched out because the shutter was open too long. A photographer I am not!

The More It Snows by A.A. Milne

The more it snows ~~
tiddely pom,
The more it goes ~~
tiddely pom,
The more it goes ~~
tiddely pom
On snowing ~~

And nobody knows~~
tiddely pom ,
How cold my toes ~~
tiddely pom,
Are growing.

Sometimes, I'm frustrated with IE too!

Please, someone tell me that they know how to solve the Internet Explorer Shutting Down On Me Every Stinking Day At The Worst Time And For No Apparent Reason problem.

The error message is this: "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem (the same one you've been having for most of the last year of awful computing) and needs to close (for the third time today). We are sorry for the (absurd and inexcusable) inconvenience (but are thankful that you have no other good options except for that fringe browser hilariously named by combining the words 'monkey' and 'godzilla')."

Parentheticals added (to little effect) by me.

The obligatory Christian worldview angle on this request is that you will help me to stop thinking wicked thoughts about a certain software giant located in Washington state.

(from Allen Thornburgh at The Point.)

It's fall here!

CPR

This is a shot of one of the two training rooms from the mass CPR class Friday. There were mannikins mannikins mannikins everywhere! The class is video driven, demonstrated on the big screen at the front, then everyone would practice on their own mannikin. The largest class I saw was maybe 60 or 70 people, and there were 15 or 20 teachers roving among them. Some classes were smaller. I don't think they got anywhere near breaking a record. I wondered what happened to publicity? I never saw anyone from the TV station or newspapers. There were lots of teachers, but really, not so very many students.

CPR Challenge

Today, I am at the CPR Challenge. I'm participating in an attempt to break the Guiness World Record for the largest CPR training session in one day. They are aiming for 2500-3000; the current record is 2308.

Solar Power

Isn't this an interesting picture? This photo from Solar Systems shows a solar power plant in the Mojave Desert, with panels reflecting light up to a central tower.

Todd & Ally's Wedding

Last night, we went to Todd & Allison's wedding. It was at Woodside of Warren, where Kendele was married this summer.It was the shortest wedding I've ever been to! Mostly a processional and the traditional vows, but they are obviously very right for each other, and very excited about sharing their life together. The baker said she had never used this cake for a wedding, but they both loved it, so here it is. I tried to take pictures of the dance, but this one of Allison with her dad is the only one that wasn't blurry. It was just too dark for a pictures without a flash, and as we all know, flash ruins everything. :)

New words for dictionary

Just in case you were dying to know, every year Meriam-Webster selects new words to add to its collegiate dictionary. Check out this year's new words here. This year, ginormous made the cut, Michelle. It seems that ginormous was also highest ranking of favorite words not in the dictionary in 2005, and what do you know, now it's real. How about that.

(By the way, I'm having a little trouble with my IE6. I got frustrated with IE7, so I deleted it, thinking I would just reinstall IE6 which seldom troubled me. But when I deleted IE7, I found this rogue version of IE6 popped up, and it's not listed so I can't uninstall it! It is a little confused, so if you view this post in IE, you get this lovely link at the bottom that says "Read more" but takes you nowhere. Trust me on this -- there is no more to read! I really need a personal computer assistant to look into this, and I know a good one, but the rates are ginormously high on this particular day, so it will have to wait. Sheesh!)

Update. . . OK, my IT Genius Extraordinaire has fixed the problem. Did I marry right or did I marry right?

07 07 07

Today is the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of this millenium. I so regret not thinking about it at 7:07 am so I could revel in the moment of the seventh minute of the seventh hour of the seventh. . . But I shall still smile today every time I remember all the sevens lined up!

Always winter. . . .

I snapped these pictures during the snow yesterday. Though the storm did not live up to all the hype in the warnings, I did see the biggest snowflakes I've ever seen. You can't really tell from the pictures, but the flakes were absolutely enormous! They did not float gently down like autumn leaves. It looked like an entire army was at work in the clouds, flinging them down to the earth as fast as possible, like little snowballs.