Argh, I’m spending a little time laptop-free this week. My faithful old Inspiron has broken down. parts are in the mail – hopefully the right parts. But until I get it fixed I have no access to my email. It’s like being cut off from the world! I can occasionally sneak in and use my hubby’s computer, but it doesn’t have my bookmarks and I can’t access email from here. So until I get back online – have a great New Years, everybody!

Who remembers Super 8 movies? Dave played with them a lot as a kid, and my Grandpa had a regular 8mm movie camera. So what better to do on a snowy evening than pull out the projector and go through the films.

Luckily Dave’s a whiz with these things, because five minutes into the first film there was a snap and the projector started making a funny noise. Turned out the drivebelt had been replaced by a rubber band years ago and it had broken again.

A little projector surgery later and Dave had replaced it with a new rubber band and got the whole thing going again. Next post I’ll have to show off some shots of what we saw!

I love physical puzzle toys, you know, those interlocking horseshoes or little wood puzzle boxes. I also love labyrinths, the little ‘ball on a tilting maze’ toys. So when I saw this, I decided I had to have it. I hope it’s as cool as it looks. It’s a 3D labyrinth inside a hamster ball – basically. You try to get the enclosed ball bearing through the plastic maze. It sounds like a great time waster 🙂 Cool story behind the inventor’s struggle to bring it to market too. Available at ThinkGeek, but since I saw it mentioned on Boing Boing I doubt they’ll last long! Supposedly mine is in the mail, I can’t wait!

Thanksgiving is a great time to get together with family and chit chat and talk about old times. For us it’s a bit more limited now days, as my husband was an only child and his mom passed away a few years ago. So we had his dad over for an early dinner. Then we went over to visit with what’s left of my family, which is just my aunt and uncle and cousin. Everyone else has passed away, including my Grandma who moved on this summer.

As we were leaving, my aunt gave me a bag of mementos my mom had saved up (she passed away in ’01, and my dad had passed a few years before that). Included were many photos I had never seen, baptism records, wedding records, and old love letters.

That’s mom and dad at their wedding reception, in my grandma’s house. 1962 I think.

The family secret? Well that came when I examined the wedding date and my brother’s birth date. Lets just say he appears to have been born a little premature, if you get my drift (wink wink). My but he was big and healthy for a baby born 2 months early!

I keep thinking my math must be wrong. How could this have never come up? Well, I guess everyone involved is already gone, so now I’ll never be able to find out.

One of my favorite blogs about homesteading had a post today about the hit professional sports will take if businesses can no longer afford to support them and their gigantic arenas and merchandising machines in these days of belt tightening.

the deliberate agrarian

Oh, what would we do without those overpaid professional atheletes to watch on TV?

And it made me think about a topic dear to my heart, which is this notion we seem to have in America that something is not worth doing if you can’t make money at it. People paint, and give it up and say ‘well, I’ll never be good enough to be a professional’. If you make wood art (as I used to do) people will say ‘you should get a table at the bazzar and sell them’. When talking to a friend about her homespun knitting she said ‘I could never afford to sell these for the hours of work I have in them. People ask me what I would sell them for’. Even when I’m planning my garden, I wonder if I could produce enough to sell the extra. But in my experience, as soon as you start making money with your hobby, it looses that joyful hobby aspect, and becomes just a business.

My husband quit acting years ago because he knew he couldn’t make a living at it. Focus on college, get a job with a pension, don’t waste your time acting. Luckily he continued his hobby of collecting toys, which was also a money-waster, until he turned it into a business that supports our family. Then a few years ago, seeing he had no hobbies that brought him joy (because his toy hobby was now his business, and he needed an actual hobby to do for relaxation), I gave him an audition notice I saw in the paper and he decided to give it a shot. Now I can’t hardly get him off the stage! Still, occasionally people ask, can’t you get commercial work or something?

It’s like nothing is worth doing if you don’t get paid for it. That results in kids playing baseball in little league, in school until they get up to the high school level, and at that point kids are weeded out so just the best get to play, hoping to move up to college or the majors. It’s that way in all sports. What happens to the kids who don’t make the cut? How many of them continue to play just for the joy of it? How many adult baseball games have you seen at the park, where people get together just to play?

Maybe we have too many ‘professionals’ in this world. We sit back and let them do the work. It might be a better place if we painted, even if we weren’t very good, just because we liked to. Or sang, even if our voices were nothing to write home about. Or acted, even if we didn’t light up the stage. Or made wood art just to give away to friends. Or went outside with our friends on a summer evening and played a game of baseball, instead of watching it on TV. What a wonderful world that would be.

I feel like we can finally take a deep breath and relax – well almost! Dave has been completely absorbed in his part in Arsenic and Old Lace, put on by Magenta Theater. He was very happy to have scored the part of Mortimer, and he worked very hard at it, and had many many rehearsals. So I was stuck taking up the slack at home and work, and chores piled up while he was gone most evenings, and recently while performances were on – and of course I was gone too because I try to usher every performance so I can watch him. But now it’s all over, the set is down (and what a spectacular set it was!), and we can relax and catch up. Or we could, if he wasn’t already signed up for the Christmas play!

Click here to see pictures from the show. He’s the tall handsome guy in a suit (perhaps he’ll be easier to spot if I mention he’s the one with hair)!

http://magentatheater.blogspot.com/2008/10/final-bow.html

I think I have to add what a strange feeling it is. I prefer not to act, I hate feeling like if I mess up I’ll mess it up for everyone on stage with me! But I do help Dave by reading lines with him, which means I get to read all the other parts at home. So by the time I get to the show I know it pretty well, and I know as soon as a line is flubbed or skipped, and I feel that in the pit of my stomach. Or I see an actor get that look in their eyes that says something went wrong and they’re correcting for it – it’s almost too much pressure for me and I’m just watching! But this show went very well, there weren’t a lot of those moments, and it was really fun to watch it every night 🙂

Gravestones from Sappulpa, Oklahoma.

I am posting these photos here mostly so I won’t lose them if something happens to my hard drive, else I would have to go back to Oklahoma to get them again. I have been watching History Detectives on PBS lately and it got my curiosity up about two people in my family I don’t know much about. First would be James Lynn, my grandfather. He is a mysterious figure because he died shortly after his last child was born, when my father (his oldest child) was only ten. His death had a huge impact on the family in ways that could not have been predicted, throwing them into poverty, and when my grandmother fell ill with TB, and had to go to a hospital in AZ, the boys were sent to an orphanage, while the girl got to stay home with her grandparents. There is a lot more to this story, including the fact that James apparently served in France during WWI, something I didn’t know until I saw his gravestone.

This is my dad’s mom’s father, so my great grandfather. I knew my great grandmother, but she had dementia when I knew her, so it’s not like I have fond memories of my time with her. I never heard anyone talk about him. I don’t know why.

About five years ago we redid the front courtyard, and turned it into a beautiful little Japanese garden, with a trickling pond, little pagoda, some flowering pond plants, and a little clump of bamboo in the back. Oh, it looks so pretty!

Through a lack of maintenance and a good deal of growth, that bamboo got completely out of control, sending runners in every direction, coming up next to the house and sneaking under the siding and pushing it loose, pushing up walkway bricks, and generally causing havoc. We cut it back as soon as we’d spot them, but the shoots could easily grow a foot a day and shoot up six foot high before unfurling. It was nuts. Little bamboo leaves choked the pond and covered the other plants and the sidewalk, since they seem to constantly fall. This week I’d had enough!

I cut and hacked and sawed my way through the whole thing. What had started out as an innocent little pot of bamboo had spread to take up that whole area behind the pond, about 12 foot long, five foot wide. Now I got all the upright branches out of the way, I just have to dig out the rhizome under the ground. I’m hoping that kills it, or enough of it that we can deal with chasing down the runners and getting rid of them.

Maybe when I get the rhizome excavated I’ll put in a bigger pond. I’ve always wanted to have koi.

No picture today, just a short observation on my favorite SPAM 🙂

I get lots of spam, unfortunately, because I have had the same email address for a long time, and my friends and family know it, and I have no intention of changing it just to get away from those slime-bucket spammers. Thunderbird does a good job of making much of it disappear before I even have to see it. However, there is a certain kind of junk spam I actually will go dig in the trash folder to read, because they make me laugh. Oh, do they make me laugh!

Girls always smiled at me and even chaps did in the unrestricted comfort station!
Well, now I giggl at them, because I took Me – ga – Di k
for 6 months and now my phallus is badly weightier than usual.

What really cracks me up is that these remind me of the old Ad-Libs. They obviously have a list of words they thought were appropriate, and the bot picks from them to create the same classy little piece of poetry, just a little bit different every time:

Princesses always smiled at me and even boys did in the unrestricted bathroom!
Well, now I hee-haw at them, because I took Me – ga – Di k
for 7 months and now my peter is badly largest than national.

“badly largest than national” huh? Better get that looked at. And just a tip, if the boys in the bathroom are smiling at you, it’s really more of a come-on than a criticism.

Chicks always hee-hawed at me and even fellows did in the national lavatory!
Well, now I sriek at them, because I took Meg, a dik.
for 6 months and now my putz is very much largest than usual.

If the chicks are hee-hawing, you may be at a donkey show. That may explain the sriek(sp)ing too 😀

Dames always whizgiggled at me and even youths did in the public water closet!
Well, now I sriek at them, because I took Mega. Dik
for 4 months and now my member is greatly largest than usual.

You know, I’ve NEVER thought of a Dame as the sort to Whizgiggle at someone. They just don’t do that. They walk into dimly lit offices late at night and hire private dicks.

Princesses always giggled at me and even gentlemans did in the federal water closet!
Well, now I hee-haw at them, because I took M eg ad ik
for 6 months and now my shaft is very much weightier than civil.

Perhaps that shaft was dug by the corp.

These are just so funny, the mix ‘n match is just priceless. Maybe someday they will eliminate spam (and hang the spammers by their thumbs in the public square, and we’ll all build a bonfire around them and dance and cheer), but until then I will continue to get a whizgiggle out of these.

These are my favorite days. I think I would be be happy anywhere in the world where I can see rolling fields of green, topped by blue skies and puffy white clouds. It’s a perfect day!