Monday, January 01, 2007

Happy New Year 2007! This is an open thread, so talk about whatever you want.

I'm into new for this thread. No. 1 has a new boyfriend, Daniel, who sent her flowers to arrive before she did on her trip to Illinois for Christmas. Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting I ran into the new owner of my folks' house in Chicago while I was in Illinois. Seemed the guy I'd assumed was a city worker noticed me taking pictures of his house, saying, "I'm over here if you're looking for me!" I spun around and took his picture with the neighbor he was helping bag leaves. Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting Once he learned who I was, he told me that he'd been waiting YEARS for me to return and see what they'd done to the place. He mentioned how he'd not wanted to buy it because it needed so much work, but how his wife loved it. He'd thought they'd stay there 4 or 5 years max, but 16 years later, his wife is still in love with the place. THAT's house-love. Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting He gave me the tour of the inside, as well. Remember the frontroom where you played each morning, children? Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting Kitchen: Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting Back porch: Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting My folks' bedroom became an office at the front of the house upstairs: Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting In other news closer to home, Em and I are taking advantage of how our new health club is smack-dab between Forth Worth and Dallas near the road that connects the two. New on our agenda: outings to places of interest (including lunch at places of interest) at least once/month. In December, 2006 we saw the Hatshepsut exhibit after lunch at The Montgomery Cafe: Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting When you come down, No. 2, we're gonna take you to the club followed by lunch at The Angry Dog, followed by a visit to the Women's Museum in Dallas. We don't know if we'll like any of that, but that's the whole point of doing new stuff in a new year, right? What's new with y'all?

14 comments:

No. 2 said...

LOVE the pics mom! Not much is new with me. I worked for New Years, and there was a water balloon fight after all the customers left. That was pretty fun. I have today and tomorrow off, so I'm spending it getting the apartment back to normal after the tornado we like to call Christmas.

I can't wait for my vacation!!!! Oh, how I need one!!

Happy New Year all!!

xoxo

SpeedKin said...

Happy New Year, everyone!

Open thread, huh? Lessee...

I hit the end-of-year book sale at Amazon last week. Fourteen or so books should be here sometime this weekend., Several dictionaries for the kids (spelling, rhyming, etc), a few history books (not textbooks but "real" books about people in history), a few kids' fiction, a soduko (or sudoku?) book for Isaac, Frankenstein, and some other miscellaneous books that will keep Isaac and me in reading for a bit more. That kid is turning out to be like me -- bookivore with a huge appetite.

Crap. I just realized I forgot to eat lunch.

SpeedKin said...

1. I hate butt-kissers.

2. After quitting smoking in June of last year, I gained 40-ish pounds (35 pounds of that on by the campout that you saw pics of my lardobutt at). Lost five pounds of that before Christmas, not doing anything special. First of the year, I gave up my midnight snacks. I dropped 3 pounds the first week. This week, the second week, I've given up my Dr. Pepper (a 2-liter per day). That'll be good for some more poundage off. Also since the first of the year, I've cut my portions down to not-completely-pig-like. I'll start forcing myself on the treadmill again beginning next week. Little by little, the GINORMOness that is now me will fade away.

3. I am quite capable of talking to myself but maybe someone will come out to play anyway.

Oldnovice said...

I am quite capable of talking to myself but maybe someone will come out to play anyway.

I've been trying to get further ahead in my "behind" list, but I just seem to get further behind. I need longer days!

It's already time to plant some stuff in the garden and I hadn't even turned it over from last summer yet. So, a little turning over of soil, a little soil amendment and planting of some sweet onion starts is taking time away from my other projects, not to mention adding to the body aches I'm already getting from overworking myself at the gym. When you get to doing some work in the yard your weight will come off without you even trying, I think. That's just my opinion, but I don't know anyone who wasn't overweight originally who gained weight from not smoking who didn't lose the weight again pretty soon thereafter. <-- Sentences with multiple negatives are very hard to follow.

How are you liking Sudoku? I still take the time to work at least one/week as part of my exercise program. Can't let the brain go unexercised.

Wednesday morning: Time to check out the grocery sales for the week, make up my lists & clip the needed coupons. We're trying to get into the habit of grocery shopping after the club on Wednesdays because we have a garbage pickup on Thursday mornings. In this way, if meat is on sale, I can get rid of the stinky original meat container after repackaging for the freezer. I'd prefer more time to peruse the ads, but that's because I prefer more time to do EVERYTHING (which is why I'm so behind on everything). -sigh-

Oldnovice said...

Nothing much good on sale this week...which is good, because there's nothing much in my pocketbook this week either. We'll pick up a few things Friday because milk isn't on sale until Friday (just because they like to torture us and have 3-day sales that don't start on Wednesday like every other sale in the flyers).

We're getting married (we think) next week, so we need to get the license sometime this week. That'll be today or tomorrow, I guess, right before I plant more sweet onions. Rain's supposed to come with a cold front Friday or Saturday or Sunday (just in time for No. 2's visit), so I'd like to get some of these things in the ground while the weather's in the high 60s.

Incredible how our weather is so much warmer than yours, Diane; somehow I'd thought we'd be about equal weather-wise. That reminds me...those walking onions still appear to be alive and growing from last year's planting. Should I just leave them? 'course the elephant garlic is still growing, as well (once it got started last fall sometime) and I've been planting some cloves from store-bought heads that got soft, soaking in some water until they sprouted this week, with the onions. [I know it's not the right time to plant garlic, but weather patterns being what they are these days, I'm not sure it matters.]

SpeedKin said...

Stupid weather. Hubby and two of the boys have to work tomorrow so I'm up playing weather predictor. How's it doing down there? So far just rain here. Lots and lots of rain.

Yeah, I figure the weight will *probably* come off when spring hits but I ain't taking no chances. This layer of blubber is not mine and I'm not keeping it. Dang it.

Honestly, I found Sudoku to be incredibly boring. There's no math involved. It's like those find-the-words-hidden-in-this-block puzzles that, at first glance, look like a cousin to the crossword puzzles but they very much are not. It's just finding words. I like crossword puzzles. They make me think. The find-the-word ones bore me. I love math puzzles. Sudoku bores me. Bleh. You asked... ;)

Congrats on the ball and chain ceremony! I know, I know. But, still. Congrats.

Oldnovice said...

We've had our share of freezing rain this past weekend, fortunately at times when we didn't need to drive. We have our fingers crossed today because No. 2 needs an airport pickup around 11:30am.

Sudoku is very much math-based in that it's logic-based;logic plays a large role in mathematics and is a required course for math degrees. Specifically, Sudoku uses deductive reasoning for its solution. It's not at all math-based because the standard puzzle includes arabic numerals as the characters of choice. Other Sudokus use alpha characters or symbols of another sort.

When you get to the more challenging puzzles, the givens won't be the hardest characters to discern in the puzzle. They'll be the easiest to discern. Then, you'll find yourself listing the candidates for a given slot based on givens offered in row/column/cube, working towards deducing by process of elimination. For instance, if candidates for one slot in a row are 2, 4, 6, 8 and candidates for two other slots in a row are both 6, 8, you know that you can remove the 6 and 8 from the candidate list of the first slot and just concentrate on the 2 and 4. This is the same method used in the puzzles that give information like: The man in the yellow house lives next to Mrs. Jones, who smokes Marlboros. The woman in the red house smokes Winstons, yadda yadda, culminating in the solution question of: Who made the roast beef Tuesday? lol. If you're not a student of logic, you'll think there's not enough information to solve the puzzles.

Anyway, I love Sudokus and find the "circle the word" puzzles boring, too. Em and I had some fun working "seashell" puzzles last weekend. They're crossword puzzles that have clues for "inward" and "outward" with the solution spelling the answers forward and backward (if that makes any sense). I also enjoyed working on a cryptogram, where you replace symbols with other symbols to decipher messages. Fun times; fun times.

Welcome to Texas, No. 2!

SpeedKin said...

Yeah, yeah, yeah... I know all of that and STILL find sudoku boring. LOL I tried a few on different levels and zzz...

I do like those word logic puzzles, although they can be a bit boring at times, too. I took every logic class I came across in college and loved them all. Book/paper logic is a snap for me. It's logic in my real, every day life that is over my head. ;-)

I was thinking last night that maybe my fondness for logic puzzles is why I've taken to genealogy in part. Figuring out who is who and when they were where and how and with whom, etc is all one big logic puzzle. I'm given clues from family history, historical documents, etc, and I'm left to deduce and induce the rest of the info which, in turn, leads me to the a few more nuggets of fact and so on and so on... Facts are so much easier to deal with that living, breathing people!

So Isaac is reading the fourth Harry Potter book. I've just given up on finishing Barry's "The Great Influenza". He just has a style (or lack of style) that irritates the snot out of me. So I switched books last night, starting Salisbury's "The 900 Days". It's looking to be much better. What is everyone else reading? I'm looking to add to my Amazon wishlist for the next book buy splurge...

So did the flight go ahead as planned and, more importantly, did No. 2 arrive in one piece?

Oh, and on the brain exercise -- I had started teaching myself Italian last year but then got to thinking, "Self, why not learn a language that will come in handy?" So now I'm searching for sites and books to teach myself German since it'll come in handy for my genealogy hobby. I have studied German before in bits and pieces (in addition to taking a couple of years in high school) but it's faded over teh years. Then again, I'd also love to learn Russian. So many choices, so few brain cells.

Oldnovice said...

So many subjects; so little time. :-)

No. 2 arrived safely and left safely for LV this morning. We leave Sunday for LV ourselves, so we're gonna try and hook up with her, Davey, and my niece and her husband next Monday (No. 2's last day there, IIRC).

We're puzzle-crazy fools around here, it seems. Em's favorite is crossword, my favorite is Sudoku, and No. 1 has the corner on the word finds. <-- I know this because we three (No. 1, No. 2, and I) played Boggle through a couple of bottles of cheap white zinfadel Tuesday night. No. 1 beat us every time.

My third youngin would be the one to help you with the German if you needed help. I don't know if he's continued with it in College, but he even went to Germany with his German class in High School. Geneaology bores the snot out of ME. It's interesting to a POINT, but reality always intervenes and tells me: You are who you are and these folks who came before you contributed, but their significance in the overall scheme got lost long ago. No. 1 has a little prescience, as did my mother. It's likely that this goes back generations in my mother's family, but (in reality), it doesn't much matter how far back, does it? It seems enough (at least for ME) to know that we got THIS trait from THIS line and THAT trait from ANOTHER line, etc.

No. 2 just called from LV. SHE got there safely, but it doesn't look like her bag did. :-( She also hasn't seen Davey (who was going to pick her up at the airport), so she can do the whole airport thing of: How do I find my bag?

30 years or so ago I read about the black death. It was a stunning book from Time/Life, but not something I'd want to ever repeat. IMO, you either get sick and die or you don't. I'm not gonna waste energy cultivating a lifestyle the design of which revolves around my survival in the midst of an Armageddon-like scenario. I just wash my hands a lot.

Last thing I read was about this time in life (retiree stuff). Next book I took out was Stephen King's The Cell. I read the first chapter but my mind wasn't on track when I read it and I had a lot of other things to do so I simply returned it to the library after two weeks of neglect. In the interim, I read gardening stuff and political stuff, mostly online, but the father of my children sent me some gardening books he no longer needs and I looked into those, too.

Speaking of father of my children, Em and I did the marriage thing yesterday. It was a lot more moving than I'd thought it would be; even Em was glad that we had a little "ceremony" associated with the event. We could have (and thought about) just signing a license of "informal marriage" which in Texas (a common law state) would have made us married. I'll put some photos up of the event as well as some of the girls at the gym with us when I get a round tuitt.

SpeedKin said...

Just a quick hit & run post here as I'm busy with some reading. Found a couple of (what I think are) interesting Chicago links.

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/

and

http://www.adena.com/adena/usa/hs/hs01.htm

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