Month: March 2011

A Visit to Judi’s

Usually Spring Break and judiang‘s birthday coincide and this year is one of those years. So I have broke open my piggy bank and bought a ticket to Chicago. Today, I flew there and I’m currently sitting in her den and typing this up. She’s playing Rift and her doggie (Patty) is sleeping beside me.

The drive to Columbus was uneventful this morning, though there was some snow. I discovered hoodies aren’t and ideal apparel for flying since they needed to pat down my hood. Only they couldn’t get a female TSA person to do it, so I had to pat myself down. I didn’t find anything untoward in my hoodie.

The flight was also uneventful. I skipped lunch since the food choices were high in points, and I wanted to save my WeightWatchers points for supper. (Besides, I wasn’t hungry at the time). The only eventful part of the trip was the long wait for my bag to appear. Southwest is free for checked bags, but they take a long time with ’em at Midway.

Judi met me at the train station (though I came out the wrong entrance and was across the street from her – whoops!) and we walked back to the apartment. The day was sunny and chilly – a forecast for the rest of my stay, I believe.

We vegged for a bit and chatted and Patty got all excited cuz hey, another person! Eventually, we went across the way to The Little Branch Cafe for supper. Well, lunch & supper for me. Lentil soup with goat cheese to start, followed by a Monte Cristo sandwich (basically a ham & turkey club on French toast – ish.) Judi furthered the evil by showing me the gelato choices. I picked pistaccio (with an ugly green dye-job) and chocolate. Very yummy.

On the way back, we stopped at the game room at her complex and played 3 games of pool. Judi won the first two and I lost the last game twice, followed by Judi losing it once, and then me scratching on the 8 ball to lose it for sure. If’n you don’t know how it’s possible to lose the same pool game 3 times, you’ve never played pool with me. 🙂

Glad to be visiting Judi again. Should be a fun time. Alas, only a small overlap with elsaf this trip, but at least there will be some overlap!

Paul

Apologies to the SMASters – they’ll see this in the forum as well as here.

Today (well, officially yesterday now), Mom and I went out to see a movie together (been ages since it was just the two of us – back when I was little, we did it from time to time – I remember Superman and Snoopy Come Home in particular). Originally she wanted to see Rango, but I’d mentioned a hankering to see Paul. She read the premise and decided to humor my British-obsessed self.

So we paid our $5.25 (sheesh, the price at Piqua just keeps getting higher & higher!), sat in our comfy chairs (the main reason I prefer Piqua over Troy for movie watching), watched our 15+ minutes of trailers, and eventually got to laugh mightily while watching Paul. Quite a treat and, IMO, Simon Pegg’s best flick yet. I was still remembering bits & chuckling to myself when we returned to mom & dad’s house.

I twigged on who The Big Guy was early on, and mom figured it out too before the flick was over. Amy (my sis) would be proud of us. She has us well trained. Best pay-off line was near the end. I almost stomped my feet in delight. :-)(Mother, of course, fwapped me. Though it wasn’t the first time she did it in the movie. I apparently laugh quite loudly.)

Anyhoo, Simon & Nick (Frost) did a great job on this flick. Although you get more out of it by being a scifi geek like me (the bar scene with the big brouhaha? listen to the music playing and I bet most of you will recognize it), even folks only on the fringe of scifi geekery (like mum) can enjoy the movie as well.

Spring Break – Wheeeeee!

With the temperatures dropped back into the upper 30s, lower 40s (deg F), you can tell it’s time for Spring Break! Not sure which day the ice storm is scheduled for, but I hope it’s not Wednesday or Saturday when I’m going to fly to/from Chicago!

Because my break has begun, I decided to resubscribe to World of Warcrack using my last 60-day card. *sniff* And when it expires, summer will be nearly here, so I may decide to pay some moolah and resub again for a few months. I’ll know after the 60-days if that’s a good idea or a bad one. (And then if I decide it’s a bad one, I’ll have to talk myself out of resubbing, heh.)

Before I head off to Chicago to visit judiang for her birthday (with elsaf joining us on Friday), I’ve got a couple of other things planned. On Monday, a landscape designer will meet with me to discuss landscaping the front of my house with Ohio Native Plants. And it looks like Tuesday will be the day for the folks and I to invade Ikea. Yay!

Other than those things, I have little planned. I want to play some WoW and some CoH (still on the year subscription there, but I’ve not been overplaying, which is nice.) I wouldn’t mind catching a movie or two if there’s anything playing nearby that I want to see. I really REALLY need to get my screen windows out and have the screens replaced (Linus can be a devil on screens, despite the Soft Paws). I really REALLY need to do a good Spring Cleaning of this place. Oh, and tomorrow is Laundry Day.

Definitely exciting things going on here! Heh.

Call me Adjunct Professor!

I can’t believe I haven’t posted about this yet. Typical of me to forget all about the important school stuff when I get home. But there ya go…

But I thought I should let y’all know that I was accepted by Indiana University. I’ll be teaching ACP Chemistry at Newton next year – woohoo! So the students who take the course & pay the tuition will get college credit in addition to high school credit.

The training for the course was for the second week in June, which meant, I thought, that I’d be able to do that and B-WISER camp this summer. However, I recently got a call from one of the camp coordinators that they had to move the camp up a week. So, for the first time in years, I won’t be doing B-WISER. Alas!

Still, I’m awfully excited about the ACP thing. I don’t envy the guidance counselor who’s got to work out how to schedule the ACP chemistry and our usual chemistry since there’s usually a “non-band chemistry” and “band chemistry” with the schedule, but the ACP sign-ups may not match the band student split.

Vernal Equinox

Yay for the Equinox! The days will get longer & longer until Summah!

We are 3/4 done for the school year. We have one week this week to start the 4th quarter, and then it’ll be Spring Break (woo!) And when we return to school? 8 weeks to go. Wow. 2 months…

Have had some nice warmish days the past few days, so I’ve gotten some walking done. Alas, my ankle started hurting on Thursday (no idea why) and was so bad that night I could barely sleep. But thankfully it’s getting better and today was nearly normal. Hasn’t stopped me from walking.

I made garden vegetable soup and beer bread today, so the house smells nice right now. And my sandalwood candle is burning here in the library. Yay for nice smells.

Hope folks are enjoying the changing seasons. I know that I am. 🙂

The icon says it all

I only get to use this icon once a year, so I thought I’d best post before the day was out. To celebrate, I…. didn’t wear green and had pizza for supper. Hmmm, I think I’m doing it wrong.

There is a Luddite in Me after all…

So while I was on a walk this afternoon (it was sunny and warmish – very pleasant for a walk), I saw a lady in her car waiting at a stop sign who decides, while waiting, to phone someone on her cell phone. And I got to thinking about how I prefer not to be “jacked in” to society all the time like so many people who use their phones 24/7. And that got me to thinking other tech that I haven’t embraced.

The big one that I pondered while continuing my walk, was the Skype/videophone bug that’s hit a large number of folks (including my dear chums, elsaf and judiang). Yeah, I thought it was pretty cool that I could defend my thesis via Skype, but using it to chat with my friends isn’t as much fun to me as AIM or the equivalent. The novelty of getting to see them (and their cute pets) lasts about 2 minutes into the call, and then I’m ready to return to text.

With text chatting, you can leave the room for a bit (nature loves to call when you want to chat with friends) and not miss any of the conversation since it’s there on the screen. With text chatting, you don’t have to be dressed. With text chatting, you don’t slow your laptop down to a crawl. Unless you are using headphones, you can’t really listen to music or TV when video chatting. And the part I like the least, you have to hear what people are saying. I dislike relying on my hearing to stay in conversation. (When I’m chatting in person, I have visual context clues to help.) Chatting is now getting more like phone calls, and I just don’t care for phone calls. (Still, friends are worth phone calls, as are immediate family. I hate all other phone calls.)

So the communicators and video phones from sci fi are here, but I really would have preferred if transporters and flying cars would have made it instead. Until one of these two transport systems come along, however, my best way to “see” my friends is with using Skype (or *sigh* AIM), so that’s how I’ll do it. I’m willing to put on my clothes (and my accessory kittens) and chat with the girls if that’s what they want to do. 🙂

The State of Me

A quick update to spout the following:

  • The 2011 Chili Competition was Saturday. I decided not to enter (I won last year) and instead talked mom into entering. There were 9 competition chilis to pick from – wow! Usually I have some of Jacki’s non-competition white chili that she brings each year, but I was too full from the competition. They were all yummy. But another member of the second generation won this year – Emily, Gary & Marcia’s daughter. You go gurl! 🙂

  • Went to the baby shower for my cousin’s step daughter on Sunday. It was a nice 2-hour little gathering. Mom won the memory competition (you go gurl!) and we didn’t have to eat babyfood. The cake was very yummy, too!

  • The juniors were having a special fundraiser at Culvers last night where they received part of the evening proceeds. And, well, their wall-eye is back. It was excellent (best I’ve had from them) and hopefully will sate my fried fish desire for some time.

  • And some of you are probably wondering “Um, Trina, aren’t you doing Weight Watchers?” Alas yes! This was not a good weekend. I’ve used up my bucket points (last night’s Culvers meal was 30 points – eep!) for the week and today I actually stayed to my daily 33 points. Shut up tummy, you can’t be hungry!

  • My evenings have been spent with Lynda and my cats in the library comfy chair. I’ve been doing lynda.com training on PHP (the basics, to start with) and learning a lot. It’s made me jealous of a newer laptop, but thankfully Walmart was sold out of the $428 one I’d been eying.

  • Lucy and I are currently in the library. I’ve got XAMPP on my 1GB flash drive and will be continuing my lynda.com training as soon as I finish this. Yay for learning! Yay for 1-year subscription to lynda.com!

    • So that’s the State of Me for now.

Dicks Update

Since I last posted about my quandary on which Detective TV series to watch, I’ve managed to watch ’em all.

I started by freebasing on seasons 7 and 8 of Monk. It was great to finally get some closure on the whole Trudy (Monk’s deceased wife) mystery. They did a great job on tying up any loose ends by the last episode. It will be fun revisiting the series again one of these days.

Turns out the batch of Columbo stories had two of my favorites and another ep I’ve always regarded highly. My favorite story will be in the final batch (I just love “Columbo: Undercover”), but this batch had the delightful (and sad) story written by Peter Falk: “It’s All in the Game”. This one had Faye Dunaway and Claudia Christian as the conspirators, with Dunaway making a play for Columbo and Columbo seeming to play the game. Only the second time where he lets someone off (Christian, not Dunaway). The other episode from the batch that’s a favorite is “No Time to Die” which is remarkable for not actually having a murder in it. Instead, Columbo and his nephew have to race to clock to find out who kidnapped his nephew’s brand new bride.

I’d also mentioned that I’ve been rereading my Campion novels. So now that I’m done with watching those other mystery series, I’m revisiting the Peter Davison series now. Watching Mystery Mile right now and I’m quite impressed with the translation from the novel to the TV version. (Currently rereading Police at the Funeral and I remember that story very well.)

Oh, and Moon over Soho, the sequel to Midnight Riot (both by Ben Aaronovitch) is now out in the US, so I’ve been reading that each night. Enjoying it much as I did the first book.