Skating Away

We went roller skating again. It was like "America's Funniest Home Videos: Live on Stage".

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Mashup I am not going to make: "Stairway to Heaven" and "Sleepy Jean"

Everything Bad is Good Again 2

46 words

I took this typing test last week via Sunflower Roots.

I wasn't too proud of it last week. All my efforts with report design, mail merges, MS Query, etc. have paid off and ruined my typing skills. I'm fast enough to impress my kids but they like all my stupid mom tricks like writing antidisestablishmentarianism in backwards cursive. Or reeling off the alphabet backwards. Yes, backwards is super impressive!

But actually, this revelation about my typing speed has helped me. Every time I've been tempted to "just enter this real quick", I've remembered "You're not that quick, give it to someone else." Awesome. Work for others, more time for my own job.

Just don't test me on ten-key. Please.

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Superpower of Marginal Utility: Speeding up time.

What? Free's not a good business model?

Posture Chamber

Last night I saw Penn Jillette (the big, talking, pony-tailed one from Penn & Teller) on Dancing With the Stars. During his practice they made him wear this yoke called a posture bar around his shoulders so he would stand up straight and hold his shoulders back. It was pretty small and he was clearly very uncomfortable. In a funny moment in rehearsal, he leaned up against the dance barre and tore it right off the wall. Then he put it over his shoulders and said something like "Now here's a posture bar that's big enough for me!"

When they did the performance, his shoulders were back but he looked really stiff. The judges said he really needed to work on his footwork. I told my husband, "They spent all that time trying to straighten out his shoulders and they finally got them straight but what did it help?"

At a certain point you have to say, "You know, I don't think the straight shoulder thing is going to work with you. We gave it a shot but... What could we do with you instead? Could we use your wacky charisma and have you do jitterbug jazz-hands all the way through?"

People can end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, but there they are. They don't have "this" but they have "that". And that can get the job done anyway.

If it must be done, turn the screwdriver over and pound.

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Mashup I am not going to make: "Believe It Or Not" and "You're Gonna Love Me"

P.S. One of my kids' favorite movies, Blast From the Past, has a really awesome dance scene.

B-Day Boy!

He's eleven.

40 Hours Per Week, Babycakes

My husband's back to work after a month and a half laid off! Whoo-hoo!

(I don't know if it was nationwide, but there used to be an appliance commercial: "50 watts per channel, babycakes")

Choose Your Own Adventure

My friend said, "Did you choose to have a good day or bad day today?" The rest of us said, "You get to choose?" : )

To have a good day, you had to have gotten a good night's sleep, eaten decent food, brushed your teeth, done your laundry, gone to school and learned how to do things, paid your electric bill, gassed up the car, set the alarm clock.... There's quite a lot that goes into a good day.

Run into the guardrail, say a few choice words to your boss, to your spouse... Having a bad day is easy!

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Mashup I am not going to make: "Different Drum" and "Last Stop: This Town"

Sweet Little Lies

I had to wear a rare green dress today because I wore my other green outfit last week. (And I'm dorky enough to dress for holidays.) But this dress is so ugly I've only worn it once before.

Anyway, I came out of the bathroom and my boys both said. "You got a new dress. You look pretty." "Yeah, you look pretty."

Ladies of the future, you can thank me later! : )

Cool Tools

Here are three apps that are handy and interesting:

Google Desktop: A program that runs in the background and indexes the files on your computer so you can search it just like the web. It indexes files, web browsing and emails.
Why you might like it: It's helpful for finding things like words in files, things you remember you read but not where. It's much faster than Windows search. It's useful as a timeline. You can tell exactly how long you worked on what. It's an easy way to keep track of the kids activities online. Why it might be annoying: It can slow down an old computer. It's not good at searching for numbers. You can download it here.

Bloglines: A website that tracks feeds of blogs or any site with an RSS feed. Why you might like it: It's handy for seeing at a glance which blogs you follow have new posts, so you don't have to go to them every day to see if there's anything new. Why it might be annoying: Some sites post multiple times a day and it can get out of hand. You can check it out here.

Del.icio.us: A social-networking website where you can store your links. Why you might like it: You can add tags to your links to categorize them easily. You can see other users who have saved the same links and view their links to see what else they've got. You can add other users to your network to create a whole network of interesting people to share links with. Why it might be annoying: It's addicting! You can sign up here.

Band

Last night I had dinner with 2 members of my old band, because our drummer was visiting from Portland, Oregon. She made a MySpace page where you can download our music for free! Someone once asked me if we meant to be funny or meant to be good. We couldn't decide.

I Seem to Have Lost Swann's Way

Proust has come up a lot in the last few weeks... In an Oscar-related radio review about the music from Ratatouille... In Sue from Sunflower Roots post about drinking and not drinking coffee and the reason behind it.

Robin Cook's name came up the other day in a discussion about mystery authors. And I remembered I'd read "Coma" when I was 9 or 10.

As soon as I read about the coffee incident I thought to myself, "That's why you can't stand scary books and movies, you read "Coma" when you were a kid." Because I was too old for my " I Can Read Books" and it was in the decorative Coca-Cola crate full of books my mom didn't take with her.

So I looked for the Proust book, which I barely began. I remember thinking after the first few pages, "So this guy is stuck in his bed, thinking about stuff. Yeah, this is going places..."
And now the book is gone.

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Mashup I am not going to make: "Simply the Best" and "What Are Words For?"

Truck

Saw another Coca-Cola truck this morning. On the wet, grey road with the sun's glare so harsh it turns the colors black and white again... totally different.

Cakewalk

Couldn't sleep in for worrying about stupid things, like this...

See the video of the JC Penney commercial, about 17 seconds in, a girl steps into a large cake as everyone applauds. Why? Why is her mom not doing sommersaults through the air to stop this?

Okay, it's just a commercial, but still. They supraliminally turned me off. Is this typical "American Living"? Indulgent wastefulness? In this economy? Some extreme Antoinette-zi, "No cake for you!" What will the world think if they see this?

I'm glad I got up and looked into it. Cake-stepping is an international problem.

But it's okay for babies. : )

Now I can go sleep for another hour. Good morning.