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where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

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Oh, Canada

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A while back we went to a trivia night fundraiser for our school’s PTL. It was pretty fun, despite the fact that you have to know stuff. We’ve only done this twice, but I know now to enter into the evening prepared to be the dumbest one in the room. There were no questions about stuff I know, like…….. um……. how to sit on a stool in front of a computer for long stretches of time.

There are 10 categories, and the one that our table scored surprisingly high on was about Canada. It had a question about RUSH and Bob and Doug McKenzie!

Today I was sitting around – on my stool – and thought, “What if I learned the Canadian territories? I learned the countries in Asia, didn’t I?” (I have since forgotten nearly all of them.)

I came across a good mnemonic for them – the ones across the bottom go: Bill And Sally Make One Quart of Nothing. The ones across the top go You’re Not Naked. The little ‘maritimes’ are hit and miss. Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and the other one.

So, take this quiz! I bet I’ll find Quart before you will!

Why Fi?

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Lloyd and I were grocery shopping at Wal*Mart on Sunday and I was looking at this wi-fi sd card. I’ve been interested in them, but I had questions. I carefully turned the box around on its locked hanger-thing to read the back, when Lloyd came over and just twisted the box – snapping it off the hanger – so he could read it.

I was angry at his lack of rule following, so I bought the thing out of spite. Good-bye, forty dollars that I might have spent on something else.

I’m not sure how I feel about the chip. It works well – you take a picture and BAM! It’s on your computer. The downside is that it uses the internet to get it there. I don’t have mine programmed to go to any social/photo websites, but it still travels out to somewhere before it gets to my computer.

That is not entirely great.

The installation directions said ‘take a photo of yourself and it will appear on the screen!’ Well, the first picture I took of myself was most unflattering, and now it’s out there in cyber-space. Plus, I tend to take dozens of pictures of nothing around this place, and that’s just wasting cyberspace, isn’t it?

I just don’t know. Keep the chip or try and sell it on eBay? (Pause for deep belly laughter, since that has gone so well before.)

Side note: I still use the cracked camera for school photos, and after I was done being in the classroom I was downstairs loading photos to our website. (I take the xd card out and put it in the laptop.) I also happened to be eating the day’s snack – Cheez Its. An xd card is very similar in size to a Cheez It. Do you know what is possible to do with an xd card if you’re not paying attention?

(I stopped before it passed my lips.)

I quit. (easily.)

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I’m a big quitter at heart. In middle school I signed up for track and made it through about a week before I timidly knocked on my mom’s bedroom door one morning and told her I wasn’t going to go anymore. My reason? Um, I had to get up early and there seemed to be running involved. (I wasn’t the brightest child.)

This weekend I came across one of those inspirational plaques in a store (we all know I’m a fan of those) and Snarky Girl reared her ugly head again. The original looked something like this (I can’t change the ‘you are wrong’ underlines):

Very inspiring.

My version? More like this:

Sorry, Winnie.

Luckily, I saw a kid tonight who is not a quitter! He had turned his bike into a one-man snowplow. He had a snow shovel wedged onto the handlebar of his bike and was stuck in a drift, but he just kept peddling. You go, kid.

Sparkle Sparkle BOOM!

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I have good news or bad news, depending on what you have going on for the weekend.

There’s a new edition of Bejeweled out. You can either play it online like me (unlimited time, but fewer cool features) or download it for free (like Lloyd) and play for an hour with advanced features like instant replay. We have wasted our Friday evening on this. Yay!

If you haven’t played, it’s a game from PopCap where you have to connect three matching jewels to make them disappear. It’s sort of like a sparkly Tetris in reverse.

The new version has three new styles of the game, plus a few more moves that I don’t quite grasp. The only one I could reliably get was the flaming jewel, which sounds like a cocktail. Apparently PopCap also was able to snare Satan to do the voice-overs. It’s a little disconcerting having a demon bossing us around all night – “Go!” – or alternately praising us in a low, rumbling-from-the-depths-of-Hades baritone – “Excellent” “Good” – and telling us when to move on – “Level Complete”. (You really have to say it like a Dark One to get the whole picture.)

By the way – I’m terrible at it, but I love it anyway!

(Warning, it will take a while to find the free versions. As Lloyd says, “They give you thirty chances to buy it before they let you play it free online.”)

Blades of Glory

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I got knives for Christmas! Several kitchen gadgets, really, but this post is about the knives. Mr. and Mrs. Royuk bought us a Yoshiblade – a ceramic blade that is wicked sharp. It is sooooo sharp! I love it, love it, love it, but it points out to me how dull my own knives have become. I need to find a place that sharpens knives.

Along with the knife they gave us a vegetable peeler, and my parents also sent me a vegetable peeler – a beautiful steel one with serrated blades.

Them'd peel a passel o' taters.

Dueling peelers! I took some photos of them being used, but they also involve my knobbly hands, so I’m not showing them. The metal peeler has good heft and just glides right through the peel. It’s effortless and very satisfying to use.

The ceramic peeler scares the bejeebees out of me. It’s just such a contradiction – it’s so light and it looks like the toy razor you’d get in a kid’s “Shave Just Like Daddy!” kit, yet it’s so deadly. I’m usually not afraid of knives, but I have great respect for that peeler.

So, the verdict? I love knives. The end.

Terrible Memories – Grounded

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Here, let me open my soul to you so you can mock it.

I was not a hard-core science fiction geek as a teen/pre-teen, but I could hold my own. I was a Star Trek and Star Wars fan, and since we didn’t have cable – the BBC (on PBS) provided me with Doctor Who and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. HHGttG got me started on reading Douglas Adam’s series, the very best part is in the third book, when Arthur Dent discovers how to fly.

In a nutshell, you fall down but get distracted and forget to hit the ground.

I loved that!! I believe that’s when the flying dreams started, because I simply loved the idea of being able to fly. Usually the dreams started as running, with longer and longer bouncing strides, until I was eventually airborne.

Warning: Soul-mocking moment ahead:

So, I was in our backyard on the swing set(I was a lonely pre-teen), and I was looking at the crooked trunk of a small tree. “This is it,” I told myself. The universe had collapsed into this one crystal-clear moment and I knew that if I ran at that tree and jumped off the trunk, I would be flying! This was it – good-bye, gravity.

I ran.

I jumped.

I fell.

I looked around in embarrassment.

(I still believed.)