Friday, December 26, 2008

Post Christmas Ramblings

The daughter-children are still at Rob's & his parents' until tomorrow morning. He's off work yesterday & today, so he's keeping them a bit longer than normal so he has the whole day with them. I regret suggesting it in a way, because otherwise it'd be only a bit over two hours until they are due home, but they need some Daddy time.

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Ro tickled the priests at church Wednesday night by hollering "Hooray!" right after the first hymn. I had told her it was time to pray, & she misunderstood what I meant. Rev. Jane said that we'd just been given the good news. Cute, and good timing. I managed to keep her relatively quiet when she then proceeded to get upset that Jonathan Wickham was wearing (to her mind) a dress.

Bobbie sat and colored/drew quietly throughout the service. I was proud. They'll be able to go to church Sunday as well. The lack of churchin' is the one thing I regret about giving Robert every weekend instead of the standard every-other. He made mention of taking them to church, but to an Assemblies of God church. I threatened his manhood. (He was not able to answer the question of why he ever thought it was a good idea to take his children to the same brand o' church that ran him away from God for more than a decade.)

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I have figured out the secret to cutting onions without crying: safety goggles. If the chemicals can't get to your eyes, they can't make your eyes water. I don't know why I put off buying them so many years, instead trying all the other stupid ideas out there (no, holding a piece of bread in your mouth does not work, nor does slicing it a certain way or doing so under running water--and I can't believe I was dumb enough to try that last hint). Even after reading confirmation of my theory over at Cooking for Engineers, I put it off.

Finally bought a pair at WallyWorld a few months back. And now I eat more onions than anything. Brekkie was 2 eggs, a sliced onion fried in a bit of olive oil, & a couple of slices of maple bacon. Side note here: I hate maple bacon. Meat should not be sweet. At least, bacon should not be.

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I was lazy & didn't go to church for about the last month of the semester. And so, upon my return, I had to explain several times that I had been working on multiple papers, including a monster 10-pager for Ethics (which I got an A on, thankyouverymuch) and a 5-pager for English that wound up being 9 pages (which I also got an A on, because unless you are Student Development I kick your ass).

The subjects? Resuscitation of Micropreemies and Concealed Carry on Campus. And I wanted to do these. In fact, during my English final, I voluntarily wrote essays on both the Fair Tax & gay marriage. I am apparently truly a libertarian.

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Anyway, the point about missing church for so long was that I got several comments on how great I looked and a couple of people said it looked like I'd lost weight. Then came the inevitable. So, how'd you do it? Which was answered by kind of a blank look, the suppression of the desire to say "Poverty is a great diet, you should really try it some time!", and the actual answer of "I truly have no idea. I don't even know if I've lost weight, I haven't owned a scale in more than a year."

This is not something most people can comprehend. Funny, to have folks usually quite a bit larger than I (and I am not a small person, y'all) not grasp the concept of constantly being on a diet & constantly weighing themselves.

I do have goals for the upcoming year: Improve my nutrition & get back to lifting weights. Even if the latter consists solely of slinging around the 10lb dumbbells behind my door for a while. Whether this will have an affect on my weight or not, I don't know. I don't particularly care. I just need to get more vegetables into my system, and break the candy habit.

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I've started playing a free MMORPG called Eternal Lands. I found it back in Hawaii and passed it on to Rob, who started playing it. It bored me at the time, so I never really started.

And yet I've gotten sucked into it. It's pretty boring stuff, for the most part. But simple! And there is a Newbie FAQ available in-game. You just click on the little question-mark button (you know, the one that looks exactly like every other help button on every other computer program) and then click the link that says Newbie FAQ. Then you read it. But people don't like to do this. So they ask idiotic questions in the Newbie Help channel.

They also don't read the text "spoken" to them by NPCs. The first part of the Newbie Quest given by the Tutorial NPC is to pick a flower. ONE FLOWER. And yet, there are constant questions about where to find one of each flower to complete the quest. Sigh.

And now, the server is back up & I'm off to play. Need to kill some bunnies to make hats...

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One final thought:

Three small children equals eleventy-billion minute toy pieces scattered around the living room. Barbie Peekaboo Petites are the debil.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The girls and I were watching a History Channel show on the various uses of acids in industry (because after a couple of hours, Disney Channel makes Daddy's ears bleed). One of the tidbits we learned was that onions secrete aerosols that interact with the eye's moisture to form an acidic solution. Emma was horrified that onions made acid appear on her eyes! Of such little things are lifelong issues formed. I guess its back to Hannah Montana...

You're not poor. Neil Boortz is right when he says that for the vast majority of people, poverty is a mental condition resulting from a series of poor decisions. The fact that you are working so hard towards a college degree indicates that what you suffer from is not poverty, but a temporary liquidity crunch.

I went back to school in my late-twenties and got an Accounting degree. I was able to quadruple my income in less than eight years and now I have a job that I love. With your obvious enthusiasm for learning and your desire to really understand what you are studying (as opposed to textbook regurgitation) you will also be able to write your own ticket.

Setting an example for your children that negates the anti-intellecualism of popular culture is an added benefit.

Anonymous said...

Oh, the irony. Of all the words in all the blogs, I had to mis-spell "anti-intellectualism." The horror, the horror.