Crazy Ferret People

So on the plan this week was goulash and corned beef and cabbage. I made the goulash yesterday in the crockpot but it didn't turn out very well, for some reason. I had made some creative alterations to the recipe, which may have had something to with it. I also made Irish soda bread which came out much better, I love soda bread. I'm making corned beef and cabbage today, for St. Patrick's Day. I'm not Catholic so I'm celebrating it today lol. Hopefully it will come out better than the goulash.

We saw the craziest show ever last night, it was so ridiculous. It was called Ferrets: In Pursuit of Excellence, (no, really!) and it was about these people who are completely obsessed with their ferrets. It was so funny! One lady made up songs to her ferrets, and sang to them regularly, and another said her family knew that when she came home from work, she had to play with her ferrets for a minimum of three hours before they could talk to her. She had a entire floor of her house devoted to them, that no one else was allowed in! And I'm not talked a few ferrets here, she had like 20! And they'd all scamper all over the place, which was very cute, but these people were seriously crazy. When the ferrets died, a lot of people said they had them cremated and kept them in little boxes around their houses, with the ferrets' names engraved on the lids. I was like, where do you get ferrets cremated? Then it cuts to a lady standing in front of a chest-type freezer, and I was like, oh, no, you can't be serious, and she started talking about how it was cheaper to get ferrets cremated in bulk so she kept all her friends' dead ferrets in her freezer until they had 25 lb worth! She said she sometimes had more dead ferrets in her freezer than food! This lady had children! And was married! And these were not attractive people, in case you were wondering. It was the craziest show ever. The whole thing lead up to this ferret show in Ohio, which some of these people drove 500 miles for, and they were all acting like winning was a life-or-death thing. People cried, there were some people who said they got into fights with judges, they were way into it. After the judging, while they were waiting on results, the camera panned over the crowd and it was more strange people clutching ferrets to their chests than I thought existed. And at the very end, after all the drama about winning a ribbon, it said: 327 ferrets were in the show. 400 ribbons were awarded.
These were some lonely, lonely crazy ferret people. Just when i thought the world was weird enough, people who sing songs about ferrets come on tv.

Kittens and Nieces and Cooking

I was looking for my Kitten, I could not find her, so I called her name and she meeped at me from her hiding spot, somewhat annoyed to be disturbed:
I keep telling her, but she is the cutest thing ever!!

Well, maybe an extremely close second to my niece, Julianna:
Yay pictures!

So Boyfriend and I are trying to eat at home more often, because it is healthier and will hopefully be cheaper. He is saving to put a down payment on a house, at some point, I'm saving in case someone unfriendly to the space program gets elected and I get laid off. Not really, but it seems like a good idea to have a nice emergency fund anyway. We've been sharing the grocery shopping, but since he is in class every night until 7, I have been doing most of the actual cooking. (It doesn't hurt that I can reliably boil water, also.) We've been planning out a week's meals, dinners and leftovers for lunch, on Sunday and then going grocery shopping to get everything. It was surprisingly nice not to have to worry about what's for dinner every night! And awesome not to have to stop at the grocery store after work before I can go home. I do most of the prep work Sunday, and throw things together when I get home from work.

Last week we had my mom's chicken enchiladas, which I think Boyfriend could cheerfully live on for months, shrimp pil-pil, a Spanish dish I got from Rachel Ray's magazine, chicken casserole (which I narrowly avoided burning the house down making) and pizza with as many vegetables as will fit on top of it. We're also having the frozen veggies you can microwave in the bag with every meal, which has to be the best invention since sliced bread, I swear. We went the entire week without eating out! I don't think I've done that in years!

This week we are having chicken enchiladas, the rest of the shrimp over angel hair with tomato sauce, chicken creole from a Zataran's box, and pizza. I made the shrimp tonight, along with garlic bread the way I like it, i.e. strong enough to knock out a vampire at 20 paces. It was a bit strong for Boyfriend, I think, he is apparently more used to garlic bread that has maybe been introduced to a clove of garlic, maybe just waved at one in passing. Kind of like I like my steak to just wave at a fire in passing, maybe say hi, but definitely not get to know it well enough to ask after it's health, or it's children, or anything.

It is surprising fun to be able to put together a complete meal from ingredients you have in your house. And it doesn't hurt that Boyfriend is very obviously delighted to come home after a very long day to a "restaurant-quality meal, with lovely company and a charming ambiance," as he tells me. He's very sweet, and smart enough to know that the more he praises them, the more dinners he'll get :)

Scary

Get Rich Slowly had a very good article yesterday about how a woman taught her children about advertising by asking them if they thought the product really did what the commercial claimed it did. It was very interesting, and the comments to the article had a link to an paper about the subject, which, among many other interesting and scary things said:

In 1978, the FTC formally proposed a rule that would ban or severely restrict all television advertising to children. [31,78] The FTC presented a comprehensive review of the scientific literature and argued that all advertising directed to young children was inherently unfair and deceptive. [31] The proposal provoked intense opposition from the food, toy, broadcasting and advertising industries, who initiated an aggressive campaign to oppose the ban. A key argument was First Amendment protection for the right to provide information about products to consumers. [31] Responding to corporate pressure, Congress refused to approve the FTC's operating budget and passed legislation titled the FTC Improvements Act of 1980 that removed the agency's authority to restrict television advertising. The act specifically prohibited any further action to adopt the proposed children's advertising rules. [31]

That's our government at work, protecting our children by "improving" the FTC out of authority to change things. It concludes with

Children, especially young children, are more susceptible to the effects of marketing than adults. Numerous studies have documented that children under 8 years of age are developmentally unable to understand the intent of advertisements and accept advertising claims as factual. [22] The intense marketing of high fat, high sugar foods to young children can be viewed as exploitation because they do not understand that commercials are designed to sell products and do not have the ability to comprehend or evaluate advertising. The purpose of advertising is to persuade, and young children have few defenses against such advertising. [...] [24] It can be argued that children, especially young children, are a vulnerable group that should be protected from commercial influences that may adversely impact their health, and that as a society that values children, there should be greater social responsibility for their present and future health.

Ok, end rant.

Sweet Tea

My sister is back from Canada! She survived! (narrowly). The pics from her trip are insanely beautiful, all crystal clear blue sky, white snow-topped mountains, and perfectly symmetrical conifers. I really miss snow, I haven't seen it in years. Every time I go home it gets too warm for it. I'm really more of a lounging-on-a-tropical-island type of person, but I love the hush that falls over the world with a fresh snowfall, and watching big fat snowflakes drift down from a dark sky into the light before disappearing again into a blanket of snow is a pretty good definition of peacefulness.

Maybe that's one reason Texans seem so foreign to me, they don't really understand, at their deepest levels, the ebb and flow of seasons. Where I grew up, there are 4 distinct, individual seasons, which balance each other and share time equally. I've always claimed summer as my favorite, but living in it year round just isn't right. It needs to be balanced by a winter, and separated from it by a spring and a fall, each in their own time and each with their own personality.

On the other hand, man do I hate the cold! I've considered moving to the equator, Texas is too cold for me sometimes. Like today, I think it got below 60! In February!

Although today was a good day, I got a free cookie! I went to pick up lunch with friends at McAlister's, they have sweet tea! We were getting it to go so I gave them my name and then we hung out for a bit. A few minutes later, a guy called my name and I started to walk over but this lady got there first, grabbed the bag, and like booked it out of there. So I was like, that's weird, maybe another me?, but my friend was like, we should check that out. So we went up and asked, and they didn't have another me, so one of the guys who worked there ran outside and almost threw himself in front of the lady's car to stop her, and talked to her, and got the bag back. Her name was like Lauren, she just really wanted my lunch I guess. But I go there so often (they have sweet tea!) most of the guys there recognize me, and the manager felt bad and gave me a free cookie. And more sweet tea!

Strawberry Perl

Are you tired of plain old vanilla Perl? Try new strawberry Perl! Garenteeded to make your day a little sweeter ;) Have I mentioned lately that I love Perl? That it is the coolest language ever? And that I have admin rights on my computer at work?

So this is my new workout schedule:
Monday - Stretch class, lots of yoga poses
Tuesday - Belly Dancing class, followed by Kickboxing if I have any feeling left in my legs (not today)
Wednesday - Step class, since I do need remedial lessons in it
Thursday - Ballroom dancing class with boyfriend!

I will be so active! I miss how good I used to feel when I was kickboxing, so now this gives me lots of stuff to do. I'm not focused on losing weight per se, it'd be nice but I just want to move around after sitting in a chair for 8 hours every day.

My little sister's new house. Yes, that's her name over the door. Because she is actually an incarnation of Strawberry Shortcake. (She should really like strawberry Perl then!)

Links

This is an awesome idea: a playground for septuagenarians. That's the cutest thing I've seen all day.

This is also an awesome idea: Don't shoot wolves, President F*ckhead. Can it be clearer that he wants to destroy the world? Seriously.

In better news, my mom is doing great. She was shocked with a defibrillator this afternoon, which put her heart back into its normal rhythm right away. She'll be in the hospital until Sunday or Monday, so they can make sure it stays that way and get all her meds straight, but she should be fine. My sisters said when they went to see her, she proudly proclaimed, "Look! I've got rhythm!" and sit-danced to prove it, so she must be feeling better lol.

In other good news, my sister found a great house in North Carolina! It's huge, beautiful house, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 2 stories plus a basement, on 4 acres, on a mountain, across the street from a lake, close to places they can work, and 10 minutes from an Applebees. Many of the other houses they had looked at were right across from trailer parks, or 30 miles from a gas station, so when they saw lights on the way to see this house they were very excited to be back in civilization. They will be moving as soon as they can sell their current house, which is also beautiful so hopefully it will go quickly.

My family reminds me of this fabric. We are very easy-going and loose, until one of us is hurt or threatened. When that happens, we all band together instantly, to protect or support as needed, until peace is regained. But I'm far away, still affected by every major creasing, but unable to lend my support and be supported in turn directly.

Lousy Day

So my brilliant system of 3 interlocking alarms completely failed to wake me up this morning. I didn't wake up until 9.05, when I had intended to be at work by 9, so I could leave to go to class at 5. So, not going to class today, not a huge deal as I'm still seriously considered dropping it.

At work I was waiting on someone to look at some data, to make sure it's ok, but they couldn't see my directory for some reason (on a unix system.) Yesterday I had played around with the permissions to try to give them access, but managed to completely break everything I was doing. So not only can they not see what I need them to look at, I can't see it anymore. Apparently the admin may be able to fix it, but he's awol, so the only thing I can do is recreate the work I spent most of last week doing. So once I get back to where I was yesterday, I'm still stuck cause he still needs to check this data! So, not the most productive I could be.

And I kind of wanted to go to class today, I remembered I like physics after reading this article about a paper AIAA published on research that connects gravity and electromagnetism.

Summary:

The standard model of physics, … is incapable of predicting a particle's mass. …when researchers ... implemented Heim's mass theorem in a computer program, it predicted masses of fundamental particles that matched the measured values to within the accuracy of experimental error.

….From this, Dröscher claims, you can derive the four forces known in physics: the gravitational and electromagnetic forces, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But there's more to it than that. "If Heim's picture is to make sense," Dröscher says, "we are forced to postulate two more fundamental forces." These are, Dröscher claims, related to the familiar gravitational force: one is a repulsive anti-gravity similar to the dark energy that appears to be causing the universe's expansion to accelerate. And the other might be used to accelerate a spacecraft without any rocket fuel.

… if this happens, it would be possible to reach Mars in less than 3 hours and a star 11 light years away in only 80 days, Dröscher and Häuser say.

That would be so incredibly, ridiculously awesome. It will probably not happen, but the future has to come sometime, right? Maybe I read too much, but I spend so much time in worlds that are much better than ours, it really sucks sometimes to come back to reality and realize that no, the world is not that amazing yet. I wish it would hurry up.

Learned Something Today

My car's turn signal clicks in time with Nine Inch Nails' "Closer". I thought that was cool. That song is 14 years old now, which isn't as bad as I was afraid of, at least.

Memories of Christmas

Heather telling us a story about my 4 year old nephew Eddie: He came into the kitchen and asked for a cookie without saying "please", so she asked him, "Have you lost your manners?" He said, "I've lost them! I've lost my manners! I need to go to the store and get more!" and proceeded to run in circles around the dining room table shouting, "Manners! Where are you manners? I need to catch you! I need to put you in my mouth and eat you! Manners!" until finally coming back to her and saying, "I've found them! May I have a cookie please?"

Playing Hullabaloo with Eddie, my sister Stephie and our friend Jay. The game has 16 plastic tiles which are different colors and shapes, with different pictures on them, and a speaker. When turned on, the speaker gives directions such as, "Swim to a circle!" or "Hop to a triangle!" After so many tile-swappings, the game says, "Freeze! If you're on a blue triangle, you're a winner! Winner, do a funky dance!" The winner got a hug from Eddie and then everyone danced, and if you've never seen a 4 year old do a funky dance, you have not lived.

Holding my 10 month old, little fat doll of a niece Julianna, in her adorable Christmas dress, and posing for pictures with every combination of my family we could think of. I even managed to keep my eyes open in some of the pictures! Not many though lol.

Coming home from Target with my Mom and Dad and Heather and the 2 kids, and when it was time for them to leave, I asked Eddie for a hug. I had been holding the baby, Julianna, so he said, "You've had enough hugs!" So my Mom asked for one, and he said, "Ok, but I only have 3 left after that!" After he gave my Mom one, he deigned to give me one, but then "I only have 2 hugs left!" He very graciously gave them to my Dad and my sister.

Walking around New Hope with Stephanie, I love that place! It's in PA, a very cute little town. It's almost a tradition now for us to go and have lunch someplace nice there, then walk around to all the shops. It's funny, we fought like cats and dogs when we lived together, but since I've moved out she's my best friend.

Heather's excitement when my dad and I opened one of her gifts to us, personalized doormats with our latitude and longitude printed on them! She made us open them at the same time, so the surprise wouldn't be spoiled, and we both loved them!

My mother lying to my face when I asked her if she had had time to finish the wallhanging she'd promised me! She said "Oh no, it's on the list somewhere" when I asked about it before Christmas. I was so surprised when I unwrapped and opened a box to see the gorgeous wallhanging completed on Christmas I almost fell over!

I love my family! I wish I got to see them more often. The kids grow up so fast! Luckily Steph is planning come visit me in March, so I just have to wait til then to see her!

RAH Quotes

Apparently I read a lot of Heinlein growing up. Here are quotes from some of his that I think are nifty (from his wiki article)

An armed society is a polite society.

Beyond This Horizon (1942)

Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to so something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

A zygote is a gamete's way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe.

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.

Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.

If the universe has any purpose more important than topping a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help, I've never heard of it.

It is better to copulate than never.

Of all the strange "crimes" that human beings have legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy"is the most amazing — with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for second and third place.

There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know. So why fret about it?
Time Enough for Love (1973)

Women seem to have almost unlimited capacity for forgiveness. (Since it is usually a man who needs forgiveness, this must be a racial survival trait.)
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)