Dangle Crazy

Thursday night, knowing I didn't have to get up early for MOW, I stayed up very late. Friday morning, my body, apparently used to getting up early on Fridays, woke me up at 8:10 a.m. I think I had about 3 1/2 hours of sleep. Since there was nothing to be done about it, I got up.
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I called Lo a little before 10:00 to tell her about my Thanksgiving day. Then I started to fade. Right at 10:30 a.m., I interrupted whatever she was saying to loudly, too loudly I thought, proclaim: Hey! I'm sorry but I have to take a nap RIGHT NOW.
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I clicked the "off" button on the phone and flopped over on the couch. The TV was on HGTV. I woke up a little after 1:00 and HGTV was running a special on Christmas decorations. As I was slowly waking up, they showed something like "Cool idea #5" or something and BAM! I was all, Oooooh, I LOVE that! It was something about dangling things on a very long string. I was half asleep but, man, I fell in love. Then I went a little crazy this past weekend.
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I hung these red things from the chandelier in the living room:
Then I hung some of My Sweetie's vintage Snoopy and Charlie Brown ornaments:

And if that weren't enough, I took it outside and hung these ornaments around the front porch:

I guess there really is something to being suggestible when you first wake up. Now I want to find more places to dangle ornaments. I bought some more today.

On The Homefront

I am loving the crazy bright colors of that Crape Myrtle in my backyard

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I haven't really been posting much about stuff just happening at home, so I'm going to do a roundup here of as much as I can think of before I forget everything.
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We started noticing sometime in October that our new dryer (we bought it in July) was having a hard time drying jeans and towels. Of course we were too busy in October to do anything about it anyway. A couple of weeks ago I called Best Buy and told them that we were having to run the dryer on the highest setting 3 times to get jeans and towels dry. They hooked me up with the repair people and the first thing the girl said was, "That's usually a clogged vent." For some reasom which I can't begin to fathom, that put me on the defensive and I was all, "Oh no! We have great vents!" Which was really stupid. Because after she made an appointment and the guy came out, he said my vent was clogged. Our dryer vents to the roof. I don't go on the roof. I called José, the guy that had dismantled and hauled away the old spa tub. He came out a day or so later and got up there and cleaned it out and reattached everything the Best Buy guy had taken apart in the laundry room. Now the dryer works like a charm and I've had to learn to use lighter heat settings.
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I've made a conscious decision to stop dreading Thanksgiving at my MIL's house. The truth is, there will most likely not be many more there. My FIL will not be around much longer and when he dies, my MIL will have to sell the house. So I've decided to make the most of the time left and be a good sport about the whole thing. It still amazes me that so many people love a holiday based around feasting and football. I'm just not one of those people.
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Christmas - that's MY favorite holiday. For years I've wanted to try the Razzoo's cajun fried turkey, so this year we ordered a fun cajun meal and we are having the newlyweds for Christmas dinner. It will be the first Christmas with a son-in-law and a married daughter. I'm also going to order an apple spice cake from the grocery store for dessert. That's going all crazy, because I am not a desert person, but it's not always about me. After dinner I plan to force the kids to play Cranium with us. I think it will be fun.
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My mother has a tumor in her bladder and is having it removed on Tuesday. They will send it to a lab to see exactly what it is. I've been tense all month about this. I feel like I will not quite be myself until I know what we're dealing with. If it is something bad and requires chemo or something, I will go to North Carolina to help her out. My brother is driving down on Monday to spend the night and go with her, so he will keep me informed about everything. I just keep praying that it's something benign.
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My new Meals on Wheels route is the gift that keeps giving. And by "new" I mean the local one I started early this year. I will have this Friday off and also the Christmas eve Friday. I rarely had any days off when I delivered on Wednesdays. I think I only had 4th of July and Christmas day if they happened to fall on a Wednesday. Thanksgiving Wednesdays were always extra work because we had to deliver the holiday turkey meal as well as the regular meal. Of course next year I will not have a Christmas holiday but I will always have the Thanksgiving Friday off. It's fun to have a day off.
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The weather here has been unseasonably warm - in the 80's - but that is all supposed to end on Thanksgiving. Of course, because this is Texas and the weather is totally unpredictable, they have changed the forecast all week. Originally they said it would drop to 29° Wednesday night and now that has changed all the way to 49°. That's 20 degrees! Apparently this cold front is slower than they thought. Now they are saying it will drop from 49° during the day on Thursday. This may be the longest we've gone without having to drag out the humidifiers. Also the longest for having to bring the plants into the garage. But I really would like to have a fire in the fireplace.
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I think that's about it on the homefront. My basketball team is kicking ass, the weather is nice, I get Friday off, and my favorite holiday is just around the corner. If Mom is okay, life is just peachy.

Question Asked, Question Answered

I never really thought about the word "ponder" much, which is strange, because I spend most of my time pondering things. I pretty much wake up every morning with questions in my head and now that I think about it, I go to sleep every night with questions in my head. I'm glad I'm not a cat or I surely would be long dead from curiosity.
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I love astronomy and I end my day every day by looking at the APOD - the Astronomy Picture of the Day. I've woken up half dead on the couch in the wee hours of the morning and dragged myself in here to look at the APOD. When I go on vacation, the first thing I do when I get home is look at all the APODs I missed. I love my APOD.
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The other day, I was pondering the whole "universe is expanding" concept and thought about all the gallaxy collision photos I have seen - like the one above. My brain could not reconcile expansion and collision. I thought: If everything is moving outward, how can things run into each other? My next thought was: I wish I could ask an astrophysicist. On a whim, I typed "ask an astrophysicist" into google. Guess what?
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Yes! There is a website for that! I sent this question: If the universe is expanding, why do galaxies collide? If everything is moving outward like a perfect spiderweb or pond ripple, how can things run into each other? It seems to be counter intuitive. And I got an answer!
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A NASA astrophysicist, James Ira Thorpe, sent me this response:

Excellent question! When we speak about the expansion of the universe, we are referring to the largest length scales of the universe.
On those scales, it is true that all objects are moving away from one another. However on smaller scales (where small can include galaxy clusters that are tens of thousands of times larger than our galaxy) the strength of gravity can still overcome this universal expansion and lead to galactic collisions. However, the recent discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating means that the scale over which gravity wins over expansion is shrinking. Eventually galaxy clusters, galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets, people, and all matter will be driven apart! Fortunately we have a long way to go before that happens, if ever.
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I think it's really cool that I can ponder something and get an answer on the internet. I think it would be really awesome if every single question we had could be answered just by typing it into the internet. Maybe it will happen. That's something to ponder.

Strange Workings of the Mind

I had never really looked at the Rorschach ink blots before, so I looked them up today and as soon as I saw this one:
I thought of this guy:

I thought: That's the Keep on Truckin' dude dressed up in a fringey leather biker suit coming at me on a motorcycle.

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I looked up the info on the card and it is considered a masculine card, so I got that right, but it's also called the "Father Card" so I was way off on that.
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I'm really not sure what my impression of that blot says about me. Any ideas?

Ellen Craft

I've mentioned before that our normal Friday night is spent watching the week's worth of "Jeopardy!" that we have recorded. There was a category called "Lady Antebellum" on one of the episodes. The category was about famous women before the U.S. civil war. Ellen Craft was one of the subjects of the category and they said that she was a slave woman who posed as a white man to escape the south. I was all, What!!??
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I had My Sweetie rewind so I could hear the name again and I wrote it down. I couldn't believe that in 49 1/2 years I had never heard of this woman. Very late Friday night I looked her up. Not only did she disguise herself as a white man in 1848, but she took along her husband posing as "his" slave. And not only that, but her husband later wrote a book about it. The book is Running 1000 Miles For Freedom and the whole thing can be read online on a University of Virginia site RIGHT HERE.
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I sat right here in the early hours of Saturday and read the whole thing - it's not too long - and was spellbound. I've been thinking about it all weekend. It's really an amazing story and I find it incredibly hard to believe that it has never been made into a movie or a miniseries. It's historical, it's a thriller and the suspense is crazy.
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Some of you may already know the story of Ellen Craft, but I had never heard it. If you had never heard of Ellen Craft until just now, please take time to read the book on the link I provided. It's free, it's amazing, it's nerve-wracking and it's actually true.

Unexpected Things

Unexpected Thing #1: My Sweetie actually said I could post this picture of him!
Unexpected Thing #2: The annoying "tune" that my cell phone plays when I have a voice mail woke me up Tuesday morning. When I got up and went to another room to check it, I had 4 calls from a number including the hang up voice mail. The number looked vaguely familiar so I called and got a voice mail from one of my Meals on Wheels client ladies. I waited about 15 minutes longer and tried again and it went to voice mail again. I had called her two Fridays ago because she wasn't home so I knew my number was stored on her inbox. I was afraid something was wrong and called the MOW office to tell them to call her family contact. About an hour later the client lady called me to ask why I had called her. Apparently, her 4 calls to me were what I call "pocket calls." Yeah, it was an annoying way to wake up, but I'm glad she was okay.
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Unexpected Thing #3: We updated something on this computer and now everything that was convenient is gone. My Sweetie thinks he can put back the things I want. I hope so. Also I can't copy and paste here on blogger and now the message box that I used to click "yes" on, I now have to click "no." Of course, I keep clicking "yes" and have to start over. Why would they change the wording? Dicks.
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Unexpected Thing #4: I had to turn the air conditioner back on today. November 10th. Air conditioner. And it's stilll on. That's just weird. And quite unexpected.

Some pics and things

I finally found a solution for my other computer that was overheating:
It has worked so far. That last baseball game on Halloween, we had true nosebleed seats. I took a picture looking straight out from my seat so you could see just how high up we were:

This next picture was taken in the smoking area of the upper deck where we were. Our seats were actually UP from there. That's Six Flags in the background:

And this last picture, well, I was taking a picture of the flag but after I got home and looked at the picture, it seemed more of a picture of people taking pictures. I think nearly every person down there is taking a picture.:

I think I'm caught up with my pictures now. I surely enjoyed my weekend of doing nothing for the first time in maybe 6 weeks. Also I invented a texting code for my daughter. She has a habit of asking me questions that require answers too long for a text. I have come a long way from my early texting days and am pretty good at it especially considering I don't have one of the newer keyboard phones, but some things just can't be said in a few sentences. So I told her that from now on if the answer is long, I'll just type: TM2T. That means "Too much to text." If she wants to know the answer she can call me.

The Flying Drumstick

Is it just me or does Comet Hartley look like a giant fried chicken leg?

The Time of No Thinking

(I forgot to mention in my last post that the main reason I included the picture of the wedding party was because my daughter was holding the bouquet I made. It really was as easy as the youtube video I had posted a while back. I wonder how much money I saved.)
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I have really enjoyed these last few days. I call it "My Time of No Thinking." September and October were so full of thinking. I'm not used to thinking so much. I was thinking, thinking, thinking and then suddenly it was like someone flipped a switch. I was done thinking.
I really didn't want to think of another single thing.
I am on a thinking break.
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I have a project coming up but I don't want to think about it right now. I have to buy groceries later today, but I have no list and no idea what to buy. I believe the weather is a little weird but I don't really want to look it up or think about it. I hope nothing important comes up in the next few days, because I would be hard pressed to make a decision. And really I just don't want to think about it.

Wedding Pics!

Baseball season is finally over. The Rangers lost and it sucked and we didn't even go to the final game because we were exhausted. I kept hearing Danny Glover's voice from the Lethal Weapon movies saying, "I'm getting too old for this shit." Except I've been hearing that in my head all month. What a long and busy month. All the wedding stuff and then all the baseball stuff. Now I have 12 more days before college basketball starts and in my dream world I would spend it lying on the couch.
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This was the wedding party:
And since you guys always make fun of my random attempts to blur out My Sweetie (because I'm not allowed to show him here) I decided to replace his head with an image of Cary Grant. Why not? So this is me and "Cary Grant" and the newlyweds:

This next one is my brother, "Cary," my daughter, me, Mom and Lo:

I think of that picture as "My Family." The one below is "My Family" and my daughter's dad's family. I think his wife looks like Katherine Heigl. I had never seen her with blonde hair before, but then again I haven't seen her since 2002.:

I think we lined up better than they did. This last picture is my favorite. I loved my daughter's facebook caption for it -The women that helped put me together that day :)

I hope I get rested up soon from October. I slept 9 hours Sunday night and then spent all of Monday yawning. Maybe I'll go to sleep now for 9 more hours and then take a nice long nap this afternoon. That sounds good.