Category: General

I have to admit that just a month ago I thought the teachers here in Houston at my son’s elementary school were nuts with their requirements for 4th graders. Then I read this e-mail I got from a Mom’s list that I am on:

Patrick (who is in 2nd grade) has to make a toy that is completely “new” and unheard of. I thought, O.K., we can do that. BUT….. then I read that you must incorporate a simple machine into it. A simple machine is a pulley, lever, wheel and axle, inclined plane, wedge or a screw. Also, this has to be something that he can do much of the work on, and he must be able to write then read a report on it and explain its function as well as how we made it to the class

Maybe it’s just me, but these projects sound like something that the parents are expected to do more than something to encourage the children to learn. I guess that their logic is that it will encourage free thinking or something, be creative. In reality? I think it encourages the parents to have a few good strong drinks.

Skin #8, the Venice skin is now working again. I thought I had changed all of the required files, and it has left me baffled for awhile now as to why you couldn’t set it to the “Venice” skin on the Skin Selector page. So I wrote up an e-mail to Amy finally to get her feedback. I owe my skinnability to her. Then I realized that while I changed one of the files, I never changed the cookiecheck.php file. And maybe that needed to be changed? Sure enough, as the e-mail left to Amy, I changed the cookiecheck file, and there it was. I tweaked the code, and the Venice skin is back in action. More lessons learned…

Yeah, well. I never manage to make the Monday Mission 2.1 ON a Monday. I didn’t realize I would be playing with the new MT Templates quite so late last night. So here it is …

1. What is your favorite TV show/cartoon from your childhood?
Good. He didn’t say “one”. I can have many favorites, mine are from different centuries after all: The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and the *original* Scooby Doo, before Scrappy came along. I also loved Sesame Street, Electric Light Company, and Mr. Rodgers. (Would you be mine… could you be mine… won’t you beeeee… my neighbor!)

2. Sometimes you just can’t count on other people to support something you feel is important. What was the last thing you had to do for yourself that someone close to you didn’t think was important?
Hmmmm. Uhm. Uh. Well, it seems to happen a lot, but most of the things aren’t really important important. They seem pretty trivial. The most important things that have happened I seemed to have everyone’s support on.

3. On the other hand, sometimes people can really surprise you. Recall a moment when somebody close to you supported you when no one else would.
I guess I am lucky. I can’t recall a time when I only had the support of one person. Normally if it’s that important and that good for me it seems that I have the support of all of the people close to me. I feel quite blessed.

4. Last time I got really depressed/upset, it made me want to do something really destructive but within control (like eating something bad for me). Have you ever had that feeling? What did you do?
Normally when I have that feeling I just want to retreat. I want everyone to just leave me alone until I get over it.

5. Let’s hear your favorite or most quoted line of movie dialog.
“Call me on 911, I’ll get it.”
From “Woo” which I highly recommend as being one of the most hysterical movies of all time, and it’s the scene where they go to file a report at the police station. Cracks me up every time! There are about 100 other lines from that movie that are great, but that one is my all-time favorite.

6. What is “your song?”
Truly depends on my mood. I don’t think I have a specific song. If I did, I have a feeling it would be something quite ’80s. Probably the Go-Gos. Something like “We’ve got the Beat” or along those lines.

7. We all make mistakes. We can’t go back and erase them, but hopefully we learn something. What mistake in your life has taught you the most? Did it keep you from repeating the mistake again?
Kids, listen to me. Sex makes babies. It’s not rocket science. If you don’t want to have one, then don’t do it. No method of protection is 100%.
Oh, and never stay in a job or a relationship that makes you truly miserable. There is no money in the world that can make up for misery like that.

BONUS: “If you guys know so much about women, how come you’re here at, like, the Gas ‘n Sip on a Saturday night, completely alone, drinking beers, with no women anywhere?”
I’m thinking this is a line from a Kevin Smith movie. Maybe Clerks? Or Chasing Amy? Hmmm… (I am so bad with quotes.)

Kymberlie just IM’d me and told me that Wendy’s Founder Dave Thomas Dies. “Dave Thomas, the portly pitchman whose homespun ads built Wendy’s Old-Fashioned Hamburgers into one of the world’s most successful fast-food enterprises, died Tuesday of liver cancer. He was 69.” Wow. Ok, I don’t know why I have chills, but I honestly do. I guess if you think about it, Dave Thomas has been around most of my life promoting Wendy’s. I’m a child of the 80’s. Where’s the Beef? You know all of that. I think it was his down to earth nature that made him so special. The fact that he was an adoption advocate … well, it seemed to me that he had a good heart. I will miss him, seeing him on the commercials – I guess you don’t realize what a part of your life things like that are, no matter how small, until they are gone.

You know how it goes. First you are reading Lee’s site, and she is all sappy and has beautiful pictures of snow covered pine trees. Her sappy post leads me off to Brandy’s site. I would have been heading there a few links down the list anyways, but I go early on just to read what she has to say that prompted Lee’s sappiness. Brandy also mentioned Jo’s site. Jo has been MIA since September, and I have missed her. A lot. When I first set up my blog I discovered her amazing site, and was more then thrilled when I found out that she had linked to my site because she liked my tagline of “To Make a Short Story Long…”. You know how it feels when you discover someone is linking to you. It’s just a good feeling. How I miss her. But on her site she has a link to Soapboxgirls … and there is a fantastic article by Felicia! All about how you can become a hardbody by doing Yoga. Full circle through my favorite sites I go, it’s amazing sometimes how the web works like that.