January 21
[Taken July 7, 2007 | Unidentified flowers | Dayton, OH]
Today is a bank holiday - Martin Luther King Jr Day - so I have the day off from work. Not that I am completely free from work, since I have enough to do that I am pulling at least a half day's worth from my office at home.
When you sit back and ponder it, it really is an odd chain of actions/decisions that started with a black civil rights organizer being shot 40 some years ago and ended with me getting to sleep in today. Odd. But then, almost every thing seems a bit odd if you step back from it and think about it for a while.
I am enjoying taking it a bit easy today.
January 20
[Taken October 28, 2007 | Along the Appalachian Trail | Great Smoky Mountains National Park]
Recipe for rice krispie treats.
Ingredients:
3 tablespoons butter
1 (10 oz.) package regular marshmallows
6 cups Rice Krispies
Directions:
Melt butter in a large saucepan over low heat. Add the marshmallows and stir until completely melted. Remove from heat. Add Rice Krispies cereal. Stir until well coated. Using buttered spatula or waxed paper,
press mixture evenly into a 13 x 9 x 2-inch pan coated with cooking spray. Cut into 2-inch squares when cool. Eat.
Simple. Delicious. A good thing to do when it is 3 degrees outside, and you have just gotten a fresh stack of books from the library, and have the rest of the afternoon to enjoy yourself.
January 19
[Taken November 10, 2007 | Chandelier in the Residence | Munich, DE]
Lessons learned: Always make sure that you have keys to both the front door knob and the front door deadbolt on your keychain, and never totally rely on the garage door opener to get in and out of the house.
This is because one day you might go out to dinner. While you are at dinner, you might notice the restaurant lights flickering and dimming, but you might think nothing of it. Then you might get home, and find that there is a blackout that covers your whole neighborhood. Since the power is out, you can't use the garage door opener to get into the house that way, like you do pretty much every single day. (Seriously, the front door pretty much only gets opened for guests and package delivery. Also, you can't manually open the garage door from the outside.) But that's not a problem, because you have your house keys, right? And that is when you discover that while your key will open the lock in the front door knob, it won't open the dead bolt. It won't open the back door either.
Drive to Barnes and Noble. Sit in the coffee shop part of the store for an hour and a half, reading and sipping hot beverages.
Drive back home to re-assess the situation. The power is still out.
At this point in the adventure I remembered that Sarah had a copy of my front door dead bolt key.
Drive to Sarah's to get the key. Drive to Meijers to stock up on candles. Get home. Unlock the front door (hooray!). Gather candle holders, lighter, matches, etc. (Hooray for mini-flashlights on keychains.)
Light the first candle. The power comes back on.
Lessons learned.
January 13
[Taken December, 2006 | The Tower | Paris, FR]
My Christmas present to myself this year was a large format photo pronter (Canon, of course) and I have been carefully pouring through all of my photography archives looking for items that are worth printing out at 11x14, framing, and hanging on the wall. I have found a lot of photos that I frankly had forgotten about, including this one. I could wall paper my entire house with my photography, and still have a lot of photos left over to line the cabinets with. The problem here is narrowing down the thousands and thousands of options to a mere five or six initial prints.
Random musings about books, and the sheer number of books that I own...
There are more books in my house then there are in the average rural, one-room library. I can say this with certainty because when I briefly worked for the Genesee District Library (the branches for this library system covered parts of Flint, MI, and some of the surrounding areas) I saw just how small the collections were in some of the more rural branches.
Anyway.
I recently ordered a bunch of bookshelves because the current bookshelves were not able to keep up with the task of neatly holding all of the books… some of the shelves had double rows of books (it is easiest to do this with paperbacks, since they are smaller), and there were piles of books in accumulating in various rooms of the house and no bookshelf space. Now there are two new bookshelves in the living room, two new bookshelves in the bedroom, and a new bookshelf in the already crowded library. All of the books are now comfortably on the shelves. I am able to better display some of my depression glass collection in the living room, and there are even some empty shelves to allow the library to grow a bit. I wonder how long it will take to completely fill up the empty shelves? My guess… less then six months.
January 9
[Taken December 14, 2007 | Elana | Centerville, OH ]
Even though I can still comfortably walk from my office building and across the parking lot to my car while still wearing my workout tshirt and shorts (there is a decent little gym in the office that I like to take advantage of at the end of the workday) the weather is getting back to normal.
Monday, it wasn't just 60 degrees... it was in the upper 60s. 69 at its warmest. Yesterday it was still in the low 60s - warm enough that I didn't bother with a jacket and wore a spring weight skirt to work. Today it was in the upper 40s. Almost back to normal.
I want more snow. This is not normal January weather.
January 6
[Taken December 22, 2007 | The backyard | Cleveland, OH ]
The first big snow of 2008 happened almost right after the new year. Lots of snow... enough that I took a look outside and thought that I had better get off to work a bit early so that I could avoid all of the other idiots on the road. On the way to work, I thought that the roads were a bit tricky - mostly because no one had plowed or salted anything yet and it was still coming down at a good rate - but nothing unusually bad.
I found out when I got to the office that they were on a 2-hour delayed opening because of "severe weather conditions".
Being at work was tough, since all I wanted to do was go and play in the snow. But I yhought that for sure there would still be snow on the weekend, seeing how cold it was and how the snow just kept on coming down.
Eehhh. No.
There is no snow left at all. It is currently raining and about 50 degrees. I heard on the radio earlier that the temperature tomorrow is supposed to get up near 60. 60. In January.
Next time we get a big snowfall, I am going to "work from home" so that it is easier to take a snow break in the middle of the day. Or maybe I will just take the day off all together.
January 1
[Taken November 11, 2007 | The interior of Old St. Peter's | Munich, DE]
Happy New Year. Mine was good. Quite, understated, and nice. I have never been to Times Square to watch the ball drop, and I never want to go. This year I didn't even watch the ball dropping on TV. I think that I was on the couch, dozing lightly to the History Channel when the year clicked over from 2007 to 2008.
It is snowing lightly outside. Very pretty, very seasonal, and I am glad that it is finally snowing as I was getting quite tired of heavily overcast skies and nothing white on the ground. However, I do have some errands to run, and I hope that the snow doesn't make those too much of a pain in the ass.
Tomorrow it is back to work on full days. After the last batch of holiday days and half days at work, I am glad that we at least get a short week to ease back into the swing of things.
Resolutions... I don't really have resolutions so much as I have a year-long, high level to-do list. (I confess to loving to-do lists... it gives me great satisfaction to write stuff down and then cross it off)
So here are some of my "Resolutions" (To-Dos). It is inevitable that the list will grow... this is just what I could come up with off of the top of my head.
- Lightly sand the compressed bamboo living room floor and properly wax/seal it so that it is both shiner and a touch easier to clean
- It is about time for the roof to be re-done
- Get more bookshelves and give the library a good organizing
- Help my brothers get the online aspect of their new business off to a good start
- Revamp the back end code of this site
- Take over and redesign the website for the dance studio
- Update my resume and create a portfolio
- More fire poi (including at least one public performance)
- More fencing (shoot for winning the baronial rapier championship)
- Other resolution(s) to be determined at a later date...
I read somewhere that "lose weight" and "exercise more" were the two most common made (and broken) resolutions by far. That would explain all of the miracle diet/weight loss pills that I have seen advertised on TV lately. Almost every other commercial has been for some weight loss scam. Makes you think...
Really, I think that you should be writing (and crossing off) high-level to-dos and resolutions all year long, not on just one arbitraty date.