buy buy summer. i'll miss you!

okay, so between work and the fair, i haven't had time to sleep let alone play on the computer. now that the purple rings under my eyes have receded and i can form entire thoughts that don't deal with vendors, pin designs or restaurant supplies, i am able to remember that i used to write on this blog site occasionally.
i was able to keep jared's blog alive slightly longer than this one, but now it's time for a trade off.
i promise to post pictures soon, and maybe i'll borrow some of the pictures from his page for this one (so you can see our vacation!)

taractures

tara sent me a few pictures... three are from the halloween party at the elks and two are from my birthday at the winery!

here's scott-steve, me and tara. there's a lot of hanky panky, right there in the picture, however the signs are very subtle. look closely and you'll see it, too!
this is me and tara indulging in our adult liquid refreshment. the winery was crowded and hot, so we refreshed ourselves quite a lot.
fairy princesses and vampires don't usually enjoy each other company, but the great thing about halloween is that for one night, they can put aside their differences and just have fun.

...and if you're really lucky cher will join the party! tara's "cher" was great! and her clothes were actually vintage, which makes the whole thing even better. ...sonny was there somewhere. and you can't really tell with the lighting in the club, but laura (my cousin the fairy princess) had these perfect pink circles on her cheeks that topped the whole look off!
and for anyone interested to know, this was the heaviest costume i ever made. it took more than a half hour just to put on with all of the hook and eye closures. the vampire teeth were my favorite part of the whole thing. very real-looking.

"dog days" of spring

so we went back to the dog park today. that puppy wasn't his usual self, in a good way. you see, in the past, he's spent the majority of his time looking over his shoulder to make sure i was within a forty foot radius of him at all times. he's never had a problem socializing, but the interaction lasts a few seconds, maybe a minute if the other dog is willing to chase him. so not the case today. he had no problem mingling, running, chasing, frolicking and any other type of interactive play that two or more dogs can casually engage in. there were a few times when he would loose me, and when he realized he couldn't find me he got a little worried. once when i was talking with a group he started looking for me, so i called him, which only made him frantic because he heard me, but he couldn't see me. finally i squatted down and opened my arms up while calling him. that silly boy nearly knocked my on my behind when he reached me. fun stuff!
here's one from when we first got to the park. riley's checking his peE-MAIL.
this was taken mili-moments after he did that whole ostrich/ elephant thing i wrote about a few days ago. he was showing off for his new friends.
"tag! you're it!"
this game lasted quite a while and a lap around the lake.
the part labrador retriever that doesn't swim. "look, mom! i can still touch!"
the part lab that doesn't swim with his new friend oscar... the rotti that doesn't swim. they were quite a pair. oscar and his lady were walking counter-clockwise while riley and i were slowly walking clockwise.there were lots of meetings like this.

riley's big day

is this not the most pathetic face you've ever seen? saturday we spent the evening at bow-wow beach. we must have done three hundred fifty laps around the lake. they put a big basin by the hose to wash the children off when they're done playing. no, he doesn't swim... but he does dunk this whole head into the water and then fling the water back behind him with his nose. it's rather elephant-like. spectators got a big kick out of watching him, and he got a kick out of them watching! for whatever reason the puppies love him. they come up to him and tug at his ears, neck, and tail, and he just looks at them as if they've gone mad.
after we got back to ravenna he got "furminated" and he was too whooped to fight it. sunday morning he didn't roll out of bed until after eleven, which made me half amused and half concerned (that he's just not getting enough prolonged exercise) for a dog his size. this picture was taken early sunday morning. and yes, i'm getting the "mom, it's early in the morning and i don't have anywhere to be right now. do you really need to be doing this at the moment?" look.

cold turkey?

i've gotten a few questions about quitting smoking, the one that gets asked first is "did you quit cold turkey?"
and the answer is "yes"
but what does "cold turkey" really mean
i mean... think about it. exactly how did that term originate? cold turkey?
hmmmmmm

The Stupid Test

OK. Pay close attention. Here is a very simple little test comprised of four easy questions to determine the level of your intellect. See if you have what it takes to be considered smart...

Your replies must be spontaneous and immediate, with no deliberating or wasting of time . and PLEASE no cheating!

On your mark, get set, GO!

1: You are competing in a race and overtake the runner in second place. In which position are you now?

Answer: If you answered that you're now in first, you're wrong! You overtook the second runner and took his place, therefore you are now in second place.


For the next question try not to be so dim.

2: If you overtake the last runner, what position are you now in?

Answer: If you answered second to last, you are wrong once again.
Think about it...
How can you overtake the person who is last? If you're behind them, they can't be last. You would have been last.

It would appear that thinking is not one of your strong points.
Anyway, here's another question to try. Don't take any notes or use a calculator, and remember, your replies must be instantaneous.

3: Take 1000. Add 40.
Add another 1000. Add 30.
1000 again. Plus 20.
Plus 1000. And plus 10.
What is the total?



Answer: 5000? Wrong again! The correct answer is 4100. Try again with good calculator.

Today is clearly not your day, although you should manage to get the last question right...



4: Marie's father has five daughters:
1. Chacha
2. Cheche
3. Chichi
4. Chocho
5. ?

Question: What is the fifth daughter's name?
Think quickly... you'll find the answer below..


Answer: Chuchu?
WRONG! It's obviously Marie! Read the question properly.

sunday morning lunch

well, maybe it was after noon, but i still say that anything before 4:00p.m. on sunday is morning.
so, after church on sunday my mom calls and asks if i want to go to dos coronas. (the little mexican restaurant in downtown ravenna) not really because i just had a sloppy joe. but todd and tara will be there so i change my mind pretty quickly. i can go be sociable and drink an iced tea. plus i wanted to gossip with tara about the masquerade / mardi-gras / semi formal that i decorated her a masque for.
well, when we get there i learn that todd's folks are coming, too. i was a little shy and nervous... for a whole three and a half seconds. let me just say that these may be two of the funniest people you could ever meet! todds dad led grace and somehow added, after asking for the blessing of the food, "that todd's offered to pay for". totally caught me off guard! and the next hour was full of similar jokes and anecdotes.
too much fun.
and to miss tara, looking forward to june 20th!

who's got the monkeys?

okay, so last week i was in columbus at the wendy's management institute. well, dublin, actually, but you get the drift.
anyway, we got this wonderful article entitled "who's got the monkeys?" that was published by the harvard business review in 1974. it similates problems to monkeys, and theorizes that when someone pawns off their problems off to you to fix, you take their "monkey" from them. ...how many monkeys can you handle at one time.... i could go on and on, or you could google the article and read it yourself. anyway, i loved the following excerpt and felt it highly necessary to share...
"At no time while I am helping you will your problem become my problem. The instant your problem becomes mine, you will no longer have a problem. I cannot help someone who hasn't got a problem."
loved it! short simple and to the point. my favorite rule is rule #1: monkeys should be fed or shot (and then goes into semi-graphic detail about keeping monkeys alive that you're not taking care of and the results that can arise.)
it's just a really intelligent article written by a dirty old man with a mouth like a sailor. (we saw a video of a lecture he did about monkey management. lots of bleeps) i was very impressed, and for those of you who know me you know that's not a very easy feat.

happy birthday, carter!

carter turned one today! his mother will have to let me know when she's going to be in town so i can give him his birthday present. (unless it'll be better to mail it?) i hope he's still enjoying his air power play center thingy that he got for Christmas. love ya, baby!

ha ha wii fit!

i finally got my wii fit age below my actual age! that means i'm in pretty good shape according to the game!
oh, and we booked our tickets to florida! my goal is to be below 120 by the time i step on the plane. if i'm at 110 then i get to eat whatever i want while we're on vacation. i can totally do eleven pounds by july 20th, but twenty one is going to be the challenge. brudder is afraid that i'm over-doing the jogging and that i'm going to quit in a few weeks. i tried explaining that i do this every year. it's never occurred to me that i could just stop working out, but now that it's in my head as an option i'm a little worried.
oh, and the hula hoop is wonderful! i should have tried to figure out how to stretch the muscles that i use while playing with it, but hindsight's 20/20. and i can laugh and cough again without wincing. i'm still not all about the push ups. maybe i should practice those without the three inch board under me before i try that one again?
oh, and i keep hearing that i can log my workouts that i do sans-wii onto the tracking chart later, but i can't figure that one out, so if anybody out there knows anything about that, will you give me a holler?

i still want a hula-hoop (alvin)

so, as i mentioned a few days ago, i got a wii and wii fit for my birthday. well, i broke out the wii fit last week and put it away for the next four days. i think subconsciously it was because the darned thing tried to tell me that i was 44. (liar! i'll show you! *press power button, walk away* ) (yeah, i SURE showed that machine) well, i actually got around to playing it the other day and it makes you feel guilty if you skip days. it also yells at you if you don't visit at the same time every day. i'm just going to learn to ignore that part because with my work schedule, that same time thing is never going to happen.
here's the funny part, it recognizes other "mii's" that are saved on the console. yesterday my brother passed me and waved while he was jogging. today he stuck his tongue out at me when he ran by. and this terrible machine controls your speed so you can't pass your trainer. i so would have tackled him to the ground if i could have. later on i was doing the hula-hoop exercise and he started throwing hula-hoops at me! he did the same thing today.
when he got home from work i told him about it... and his response to the jogging thing was "yeah, on the third day i'm going to turn around and pee on you."
little jerk. it's my wii. i think i should delete his mii!
and for those of you who don't have the fortunate ability of experiencing wii fit, he was joking. and characters are supposed to throw hula-hoops at you so you can catch them around your neck and add them to your hula-ing for more points. just thought i should clarify.
oh, and my age is down to 32!

the race is on!

i'm not usually one to sit through a movie at the theater, but my cousin and i took her son (aka brat, aka the kid, aka j-lo, aka my dear young cousin, aka the boy i took to put-in-bay, aka jared) to see race to witch mountain today. what a fun movie! and i only checked the time once, and that was about an hour and fifteen minutes into it. it was action packed and the storyline kept you moving. i still think it's funny that the actor used to be just "the rock". then it was dwayne "the rock" johnson. in this movie he was just dwayne johnson. funny stuff.
anyway, the three of us are going to florida in july and we decided that we should invest in some of the originals to take with us in the event it rains one day/night and we're couped up in the hotel.
from there we went to silver springs and played on the huge playground they have. they have this spongy rubber padding under the whole thing (i'm sure it's to pad any falls from the equipment) that is so much darn fun to walk on. then we went to hudson springs and skipped rocks across the lake. okay, so we skipped maybe a tenth of them and "plopped" the rest. they have this frisbee golf (which we were corrected to calling it disk golf) course there that people were really getting in to. eighteen "holes". not too sure about that one, but i think it's one of those things that if one were to start playing they would be addicted immediately. i don't believe i'll start playing.
after we were done park hopping we came back to my apartment and looked up travel arrangements to florida on the computer while the kid played the wii i got for my birthday. i asked jared "would you like to challenge me to a game of wii?", but then i realized that at nine years old, he's probably never seen the comedian jo koy, so it made my impression absolutely pointless.
all in all, it was a pretty good day!

93.9 FM

okay, so saturday was my birthday, and we took one of my gal-pals (who wishes to remain nameless) to the winery for a little bit of celebratory adult liquid refreshment. well, the sense of humor has grown at the winery since my last visit, because my formerly posh pink catawba is now called hankey pankey. the cab is little red pecker, the merlot is big red pecker and so on. after we pointed out to anyone that would listen, that steve the bartender gave us hankey pankey; the guitar player arrived (it turns out that steve's name was actually scott, but we decided that we could call him whatever we wanted to as long as we tipped him well). now, this guitar player's picture was totally hot! one of the reasons i chose this particular venue. in real three dimensional life he's, well, polite. he even laughed at our hankey pankey ramblings. todd (from the family owned and operated winery) and steve-scott asked him to sing "happy birthday" to me, and he did. we even offered him and chair during his intermission and he accepted it. so we chit-chatted about his life in new york city and whatnot.
after the wine-o's calmed down and decided that it would be best to get as far away from the winery as possible, we got in the car. i decided that not only did i absolutely have to have the radio on, but it just had to be a country station. (somebody should have told me that there was no guarantee that if i turned the country station on that lady antebellum would be playing.) well, i demanded that my unnameable gal pal press "4" on the dash, and she did. she's a huge country fan, so there were no objections. and i don't remember what station #4 is, but i knew that it's the one i just had to listen to.
then she got a little perturbed because 93.9 is NOT a country radio station.
it was, however, just after nine-thirty at night! wanna guess exactly just how far after nine thirty it was?
ahhhh, good times!

1795.25

one thousand seven hundred ninety five dollars and twenty five cents. that's how much it costs to fix yellow 2001 escapes with worn out transmissions.
well, it's been eight days and i finally have the old gal back home. which means that i get to actually go back home! lady's been letting me use her car so i can go back and forth to work, but since burdder's car got keyed at our apartment, her car stayed in ravenna (when it wasn't with me at work), which meant that the temporary driver did as well.
it's kind of a funny story. i was told that the car would be ready monday or tuesday. tuesday it was done but they wanted to put some miles on it to make sure everything was okay. i could pick it up wednesday morning. wednesday morning they told me that it was going into reverse just fine, but it was slipping between gears two and three, and needed more work. wednesday afternoon they found that the problem was a bad part sent from the manufacturer and it would be ready thursday morning. thursday morning they said that they replaced the part but it was having the same problem ...and maybe it was electrical (now his entire crew is working on this round the clock, which is amusing because they're only open nine and a half hours a day) friday morning i get the wonderful call that it's fixed. apparently this "bad" (something that begins with an "s"... or a "p" ... but i'm pretty sure it was and "s") was installed incorrectly.
kudos to max (my uncles transmission guy) and his team.... even if it was a few days late. she's happy to be home!

197,030

one hundred ninety-seven thousand thirty miles is about how long the transmission on yellow 2001 ford escapes last.

so... i went to my parents house yesterday before the balloon a-fair meeting, and when i went to pull out of the driveway nothing happened. i just kind of rolled down the hill until i got to the end of the drive. when the ground leveled out i stopped rolling. i put the car in drive and go forward a bit and try this backing-out thing again. same results. forward isn't a problem. hmmmm

so... my dad pushes me out and i take off. i call my uncle (the car guy) and he tells me to bring it there in the morning. it's great to have a car guy.

so... i head off at 7:15 in the morning to meet my uncle. i pass a transmission shop along the way and contemplate stopping, but he's not my car guy and my uncle's expecting me. well, when i get there, and park against the fence, because i can't pull into a spot anywhere, i walk in the office and he makes a phone call... to the transmission shop i just passed. apparently my car guy has a transmission guy. i'm supposed to talk to max because it's his shop and he may be able to give me a better deal then the $1795 quote.

so... off to the transmission shop. as soon as i hit route 8 my car does that whole, hey-i-know-this-is-an-automatic-but-feels-like-a-manual-and-you're-not-shifting-gears-you-crazy-moron thing. "please God, just let me make it 2.9 more miles..." finally i see the jim and son's shop sign. Amen.

so... i walk in the front door and ask for max. this twelve year old little boy walks out and shakes my hand. okay, he may have been closer to twenty two or twenty three, but not what i was expecting. he even makes a comment about my "spyder" jacket and snowboarding. then conversation then turns to 4-wheeling. again, not what i really expected from my car guys transmission guy. according to my uncle, though, he's the best! my dad picks me up and takes me to ravenna to pick up my mom's car.

so... today is february 19th. that would be the exact one month anniversary of my paying the vehicle off. yep. january 19th i walked into the bank and said "i'm here for installment 60 on my 60 month loan. i got a letter saying i have to do this in person so you can tell me the exact dollar amount and close the account." i have to admit, i would rather pay the $284/mo bill than the $1800 repair cost, but i guess that's what happens when you make that last payment.

so... max calls me and says during the test drive they couldn't get it to go into anything but the second gear. i wont' have my car back till monday or tuesday, but it'll be better than new. ...and i get a warranty on the transmission!

i guess 197030 miles is a good long life for a transmission. i happened to find the one month anniversary amusing, after i calmed down and decided that being upset by the situation wasn't going to help anything.

but bon-voyage for that wii that i was saving up for!

(it's like a) heat wave!

i know i promised all of my GA friends pictures of the snow, but due to the sixty degree weather i'll have to take some later. here's an older one. imagine about ten inches on top of that. now that's it's starting to melt i've found that the only great thing about having small icy piles of meltdown... it's great to clean off the yard candy left by neighbors that don't know how to clean up after their pets. that snow-cone-like substance works better than the garden hose or grass. riley just likes flailing around in this mess . he starts off by burying his head in a mound of the slush and then he throws his whole body to the ground and wiggles around on his back. what a mutt!

happy birthday, tara!

today is tara's birthday! tara is one of my balloon a-fair friends whose friendship has extended beyond that of the group that puts together our town fair in the fall. she's celebrating by going to florida for a few days for (insert drum roll here) the daytona 500! i'm totally jealous, by the way! anyway, i sent her a "very colorful" e-mail earlier, and no, there's no hidden innuendo there, i changed the colors of each letter. i hope to see her tomorrow at the *four legged animal that you hunt* club!!!

well, i caved in!

so, after yet another defensive conversation as to why i'm not on myspace, i remembered that my great friend helen has a blog site here! i guess starting a blog isn't really a compromise, because i was never against it, but because of the aforementioned conversation, i'm finally going to have my own web page to let all of my friends in on my day to day adventures. now i'm going to have to start charging my camera on a regular basis! and to all of my friends in georgia, the first picture i'm going to post will be of the two and a half feet of snow that has me practically barricaded in! i miss you guys, too!