Another Fun Thingie

Your Mafia Name Is Mimi "Big Tuna" Fischetti

Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.

What's Your Mafia Name?

World Water Week

Check out the TAP PROJECT, which is part of World Water Week (click here). The concept is that instead of giving you a glass of tap water for free, which of course is the usual practice, participating restaurants will charge $1.00 for the water and then donate the funds to a program that builds sustainable drinking water systems in developing parts of the world. We don't realize it from our comfy perch of being a 21st century developed nation, but access to clean drinking water is a huge issue in many parts of the world.

Of course, no restaurants in my area are listed as taking part, but plenty of establishments in major cities are. So if you can, pay for a glass of water in a restaurant during the week of March 22 - 28 and do a tiny thing to help create a major change.

Image credit

Ten Things Tuesday - local edition

One of my favorite bloggers, Mrs. Chili of The Blue Door (see the link on the side bar) wrote today about the 10 reasons why she loves where she lives. I’m stealing from her, because I think it’s good to stop and pause and think about the GOOD things about where one is (physically and mentally) once in a while.

So here are my 10 reasons for feeling pretty happy and settled in my little corner of the Intermountain West:

1. The scenery – It’s flat-out beautiful here. Red rocks, blue skies, alpine mountains and sandy desert all rolled up together. We have canyons, lakes, trails, and volcanoes galore. In the winter I look at snow-covered mountains from my front porch, tulips and daffodils bloom in the spring, and I can float on a lake roasting in the summer sun.

2. The parks – I can do any easy day trip to my choice of three amazing national parks, ones tourists come from all over the world to get the chance to see. The state and regional parks are also incredible, with a myriad of options for recreation and relaxation.

3. The space – Although the area has grown by leaps and bounds, compared to the dense northern and southern California cities where I used to live, there is space galore here. My home shares no common walls with anyone else, there is open desert on the other side of my back fence, the sidewalks downtown aren’t packed, and while Costco and Walmart may be busy at certain times of the day or week, entering a retail establishment is not a constant exercise in battling an unruly crowd to purchase a few groceries.

4. The pace – Life is a little slower and gentler here than it is in major urban centers. Most of the time you can get to a movie 15 minutes before it starts and be assured of both a parking place and a seat, with time for buying popcorn in between. The line at Starbucks rarely exceeds 3 cars, even at “rush hour.” In actuality, there isn’t really a rush hour. Yes, the Boulevard is busy at noon and at 5:00, but not horrendously so. Things happen in their own time, and there isn’t the frenetic rush of city life.

5. The people – It’s hard, being an “outsider” in relation to the dominant culture/religion here. However, on a personal level I have met some truly wonderful people who simply want to live good lives as good people. I’ve made friends here of the “2 a.m.” variety who I believe will be a part of my life forever. You can’t ask for more than that.

6. The professional opportunities – I toiled for seven years working in under-performing public schools in two major California school districts. I loved my students, I loved my colleagues, I loved what I did every day, but in the end I felt relatively powerless to effect change on a broader level. I felt like I was serving a worthy cause, but at the end of the seventh year I was doing the exact same thing I was at the start of the first year. My participation in the ACLU/Williams v. California case gave me a taste of what could be accomplished on a larger scale, but there was little opportunity to do so. In the five years I’ve been here, I’ve worked for two amazing, dynamic principals who mentored me and help me grow wings to fly. I‘ve worked at the district level, creating a much-needed program form the ground up and learned from some incredibly smart and talented people along the way. I’ve been involved in grant projects, technology projects, professional development opportunities, and other programs that would be nearly inaccessible in larger school districts. I served not just as a building representative, but as an elected board member of my local labor association, a process I feel strongly about. I was appointed to the state educational ethics commission and currently serve on the board of a major professional organization in my field of focus. I’ve developed several conference presentations and professional development workshops on technology and specific instructional areas. I wrote the design for the state-wide program for which I currently serve as Director, and through this work I interact regularly with state lawmakers, university professors, and other influential people, giving me the opportunity to advocate for teachers and students in a major way. I point these things not to toot my own horn, but rather to highlight the fact that the opportunities exist here to be involved at a level that seemed impossible in my previous locations.

7. The health care – 18 months ago Wombat was diagnosed with a horrible, late-stage cancer. And kidney failure. And dangerously out-of-control hypertension. Today she is cancer-free, has normal blood pressure, and her kidney function is increasing, not declining. The care she received was medically and technologically cutting-edge, compassionate, and well coordinated. I am quite aware that not every person has such an over-all positive experience in the world of health care, even here. But I have a happy, healthy mommy today because of the University of Utah, Intermountain Healthcare, and Drs. Lemmon, Donaldson, Taylor, Carter, Welsh, Ray, and Worwood. They deserve to have their names listed, and so I will, because I am so incredibly grateful to still have my mom.

8. The family – Moving here resulted in a strange confluence of events that brought together me, Brother Igor and Mrs. Igor and Niece and Nephew, and Wombat and GolfDad – this is my nuclear family (along with DarlingMan, and we’ll get to him in a minute). GrandmaT is here, as was the late GrandpaE, Travellin’Dad and CrochetMom were here for awhile, but their travellin’ urges took them away. Regardless, this place has given me the opportunity to live within my family, to be a part of each other’s daily lives, to know each other as adults, to see Niece and Nephew grow up. That’s priceless.

9. DarlingMan – I found him here. The right person, in the right place, at the right time. That says it all.

10. All of the above – there isn’t a #10… just read #s 1 – 9 over and over and you’ll have the complete picture.

Image credit

GREATEST TV SHOW OF ALL TIME

Image credit

Oooooooh, A-7... wait a minute!

Another buggy commercial: The one for Milky Way candy bars, with the woman cooing seductively "oooooooh, A-7..." to the Milky Way bar in the candy machine. The problem is, if you look at the machine, the Milky Way in the A-7 position is clearly at the far RIGHT of the machine. How could this be the "A" position? Typically candy machines Start with A-1 in the upper LEFT corner. I just can't see that an item in the A column would be on the RIGHT.

I suppose that the machine in the commercial could have the ROWS lettered, in which case A would extend to the right side. But it also looks to me like the Milky Way in question is in a position near the bottom of the machine, and if the ROW was "A," wouldn't that likely be at the top?

Can anyone explain this to me???

Soccer, Baby!

Okay, is anyone else kind of creeped out by the constant "Essure" birth control commercials (the one with the mom on the soccer field ruminating on family size and her fear of unplanned pregnancy)? I'm not sure whay this bothers me; I'm all for reproductive choice, modern methods of birth control, etc.

I think it's just the play of faked-naked emotions on the soccer mom's face as she ponders these Big Issues in the middle of the public park.

The other kind of scary thing is the number and variety of bizzare images that came up when I Googled "soccer baby." Go on, you know you want to try it!

Image credit

A Scarily Accurate Description of Yours Truly!

You Are Caramel deLites / Samosas

You are blessed with a brilliant, dynamic mind. It's sometimes hard to figure out what your focus should be. You're the type of person who does almost everything well. You are very competent but also unfocused. You're not an easy person to pin down. You are vibrantly complex. You have many facets to your personality, and they're often in competition with one another.

What Girl Scout Cookie Are You?

My Secret Preppy Self

Your Preppy Name Is: Winchester Holbrook Loomis the Fifth

But most people know you as Topsy

What's Your Preppy Name?

Speaking of Twitter...

...this is just DAMN FUNNY!

The mitigated social butterfly

I Twitter. I Facebook. I write this blog (intermittently). For someone who considers herself to be relatively anti-social, that's seems like an awful lot of "social media" action. Ah, but wait - there's a screen and keyboard involved to lessen the actual social contact.

How do I spell relief? T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y! (Though the occasional midnight R-O-L-A-I-D-S isn't out of the question.)

Image credit

What decade (century!) is it again?

I'm experiencing some time confusion.

In the car, I'm listening to the audiobook of the last of the "Anne of Green Gables" books, which is set during WWI.

I finished "The Winds of War" on Thursday, and have started in on the sequel, "War and Remembrance" - so that puts me deep into WWII.

But today I spent the afternoon watching "Gone With the Wind" and "Glory" and went spiraling back to the Civil War.

I thought maybe I could find a showing of "Platoon" or "Full Metal Jacket" on one of my many satellite channels, which would have made the time-travel experience complete.

No Viet Nam war flicks available, though, so I'm settling for "Norma Rae" - which is hardly "settling" - Sally Field is rocks as a union organizer!

Gone With the Wind image credit
Glory image credit
Norma Rae image credit

Uhhhhh, what was that?

The B*rger K*ing on the main street of the Big Town (not the scummy gas station BK in the Village) sports the following on its main display sign:

ORG CHICKN $1.99

Ignoring the "chickn" (I'll give them credit for running out of letter 'E's - it is the most popular vowel, after all), WHAT the HECK do they mean by "ORG"?

Orange?
Organic (HA!)?
Original, so as to compete with the KFC across the street?
Organ, as in an internal-parts-of-a-chicken sandwich?

I need more clarity on my fast food signage interpretation. Argh.

Image credit

Changing Blog Theme

Yes, I changed the blog theme. It's fun to do that! The only problem is, the yellow I have used in the past for ingredients in recipes doesn't work very well with the new color scheme. However, it's hard to go back and change those unfortunate yeller words - sorry. You'll have to live with it for now. You can do it, I am confident!

Piranha Banking

Banks are blood-sucking, bottom-feeding, stinking, rotten piranhas that prey on not just their average customers, but on the neediest folks they can find. To wit: click here to see their latest sickening ploy to squeeze even MORE money out of their clientele and the government that bailed them out, simultaneously.

I say let 'em all fail and let's go back to being a cash-and-carry culture. We'd all be better off.

Image credit

BBC Book List

Lots o' bloggers have been referencing a book list put out by the BBC which has the supposed "great titles" of the English language (well, some of the books/authors are in translation; Garcia Marquez, for example). Anyway, while the validity of such judgments is always debatable, it was still fun to look through list and see what I have, and have not read. The idea is that you put an X to the titles you've read. One of the other bloggers mentioned that the BBC estimates that most people will have read six of the books on the list. That is truly depressing, folks. I came in at 46, and I'm a tiny bit ashamed, given that I'm a super-book-nerd, and did end my undergraduate career with a degree in English and American Literature, but 46 is not even half the list. There are some weird gaps, too. Now mind you, I did start Moby Dick; it was the finishing that was difficult (so I didn't count it as "read"). I've never been a fan of the Brontes, and honestly can't remember if I ever made it all the way through either Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. And while I haven't read ALL of Shakespeare, between my AP/IB classes in high school, courses in both Elizabethan and Jacobean Shakespeare in college, and random oher opportunities, I figured I could put an X to the Bard (and yes, I do own the Oxford Complete Works of William Shakespeare). Didn't give myself credit for the Bible; I've read plenty of it on my own and in a "Bible as Literature" class long ago in a college summer session course, but didn't feel that the balance was in my favor. The gaps certainly give me some ideas of what to order from Amazon!

Anyway, enough blithering - here's the list (and my Xs):

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (X)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (X)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (X)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (X)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (some) (X)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (X)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (X)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (X)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (X)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen (X)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (X)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (X)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (X)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (X)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (X)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (X)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (X)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (X)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (X)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (X)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (X)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (X)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (X)
80 Possession - AS Byatt (X)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (X)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (X)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (X)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (X)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)