Boarding CO

The first vacation of 2014 is complete.  I better get this documented before life activities take over.  I went snowboarding in CO with Jax and Orange Blossom.  It didn't snow much while we were there, but they had received some snow a day or so before we arrived.  So the snow was decent.  It wasn't fresh powder, but still very good stuff.  Some highlights:

1. Boarding Vail.  That is an awesome slope.  We were there for two days, and I didn't even come close to going on all the runs.  And they had runs that were challenging enough that I didn't feel quite up to that challenge.  I did enough black diamond runs that by the time I left I was feeling somewhat skilled in boarding moguls.
2. Boarding Beaver Creek.  Also a very nice slope.  I didn't get to all of that slope either.  I didn't know this before I went, but Beaver Creek is even more highfalutin than Vail.  True story.
3. Discounted lift tickets thanks to a generous relative.  Yes, they were highly discounted.
4. Visiting Aspen.  I wasn't willing to spend $129 to board for two hours, but Jax and I checked out the town while Orange Blossom used his "free" Aspen lift ticket pass.
5. Learning all kinds of interesting stuff about meat like the fat on grass fed beef is yellow, and corn fed beef fat is white.  We learned about rigor mortis and dry aging and wet aging too.
6. Becoming better acquainted with a relative. (sorry, no picture for this one.  Whoops.)
7. Delicious home cooking at the rental condo (steak, potatoes, broccoli, chicken, green beans, etc.)
8. Hearing some good bluegrass (we could clearly hear the band that was playing at the town festival as we sat in the hot tub).
9. PB&J sandwiches never tasted as good as they did for lunch on the ski slope.  You may find this hard to believe, but I think they may have even been better than the meat sandwiches that I made.
10. Beautiful scenery.

View from the slopes of Beaver Creek.

View along I-70 on the way to SMM in Rifle.

 

View of the slopes of Aspen.  Look at those moguls!  Orange Blossom said it was a pretty tough mountain that needs to be respected.  When we looked at the mountain map, there aren't any green runs on the slopes of Aspen.

Chilling out in Aspen, CO.  A big lunch and some sporting goods shopping complete.  Oh, and browsing at the antique store was done too.  The cheapest item in that store was $5500.  Wooooo-heeeee.  Needless to say, we didn't purchase any antiques.

More scenery on the way back from Aspen.

View from the back side slopes of Vail.

Orange Blossom at Vail's Blue Sky Basin.  I thought of another nickname for him:  Crax.  Amusing, yes.  But, I think Orange Blossom is still a slightly better one.

Jax enjoying the slopes of Vail.

My Valentine

Guess who gave me this for Valentine's Day?  It doesn't get any more special than this.....

Dr. Ettiquette

I started coming down with a cold five days ago or so.  It seemed like a normal cold at first, but then my eyes started feeling kind of itchy and watery.  And on Monday they were discharging gunk a couple times.  So I suspected pink eye.  Yesterday when I woke up with eye crustiness and I took a hard look at my right eye because it felt inflamed, I discovered it was inflamed beneath my eyelid.  Kind of like so (only it looked more angry red that morning):

This was worrisome as I haven't had that happen with a cold before, so I decided a doctor visit was in order.  Of the available appointments, I chose the 11:00 one because it seemed like the best choice at the time.  It would be after my morning meetings at work, and if it ran into lunch a bit, it wasn't a huge deal.  I should for sure be done by 1:00, right?  Wrong.

When I got to the doctor's office, they had me come right in to take my vitals.  But when they took me to the exam room and asked if I was a new patient and I told them I wasn't, then the nurse realized she had called the wrong patient back.  So it was back to the waiting room for me.  Good thing I brought my Kindle.  Then they called me and took me to the exam room again.  We did the usual 100 questions and went through the pink eye "decision tree" (at least that's what I call it).  When did it start?  Were my eyes sensitive to light?  Sore throat?  Mild or severe?  Sinus congestion?  Green or yellow snot?  Light headedness?  Tremors?  Feelings of weakness?  Fainting?  Diarrhea?  Constipation?  Was I taking any medications?  Any allergies? etc., etc., etc.  The doctor would be in shortly.  Not.

At about the 45 minute mark of waiting in the room alone with not even a nurse checking in on me, I was getting pretty antsy and had to go to the bathroom, so I peaked my head out.  Since it was like 12:30, some people were probably at lunch, and things seemed pretty quiet.  No one was in the hall.  I found the bathroom on my own.  As I returned from the bathroom, a nurse was waiting for me and assured me the doctor would be in soon.  "We didn't want you to think we had forgotten about you."  Yeah.....I badly wanted to say, "Too late for that," but I held my tongue and didn't say anything.  I was getting really hungry and thirsty by then too.  Waiting forever, hungry, and thirsty is not a good combination.  It makes me (and probably everybody) a bit owly.  But I tried to keep calm and have a right spirit.  As the sign in the room said, they give all their patients personal attention, so I should be patient until it was my turn for the same personal attention.

One full hour after I entered the room, the doctor was in the room.  He apologized profusely and said he ran into some unexpected complications.  What do you say to that?  I said nothing because I honestly couldn't say it was OK for him to be an hour late.  That is a lot of my time wasted.  Saying "apology accepted" seemed weird.  And if you don't say one of those things, what do you say?  I had also overheard one of the receptionists calling to reschedule the doctor's appointments for the next day because of some family surgery or something.  So I didn't feel like I should give him a hard time if he was already under stress.  And what if some minor thing like a wart removal earlier in the day had resulted in somebody nearly bleeding to death or something?  Who knows what the complication could have been?  Or maybe he went to lunch and forgot about me.....

It seems like there would be a better solution than making a patient wait for an hour.  But I don't know all the ins and outs of how doctor offices work.  Maybe they could have sent the PA in to do an extra patient.  It was only pink eye - not all that complicated really.  Or maybe they could have told me it was going to be a while so I could have gone to get lunch and then come back.

The final conclusion after the examination was likely viral conjunctivitis (pink eye) because it occurred at the same time as my cold, which you pretty much just wait for it to clear up.  And they gave me some antibiotic eye drops to take anyway just in case it was bacterial because there's no way to distinguish from examination whether it's viral or bacterial.  And that was pretty much it.  He also prescribed some nasal spray if I wanted it to help my sinus congestion.

And this is why I try to avoid all doctors as much as possible.  I really hate waiting rooms.  Because as you sit there you wonder how many contagious germs you're picking up from the other people in the waiting room. Or you pass the time by speculating on why others might be there.  Like the one guy who came in as a new patient and didn't have insurance.  Obviously he must have been feeling desperate about some ailment.  It wasn't immediately obvious what it might be though.

2014 Bushel Basket List, Weeks 5 & 6

Checked off the list:  #25 - Make beef brisket.  I made it in the crock pot, and it was super delicious.  It will definitely be added to the repertoire.

Fall Summary 2013

Remember last year (2012) how fall went by in a blur?  Well, it did the same thing this year (or should I say last year to mean 2013), and I think I missed summarizing a bunch of good stuff.

1. 'Vention in the state I live in
2. Kayaking in the hail with Marilyn L.  (Miss Piggy's first voyage)
3. November kayaking with Bex
4. Homemade apple and pear sauce - raw ingredients courtesy of Meeting Man
5. Bex visit in December - we went to yarn shops, did yoga, went to a play that some of the robotics kids were in, and went to SM.
6. Going to see The Piano Guys with KarmX et al
7. SWE conference in Baltimore
8. Fresh pesto
9. Homemade salsa
10. Scrapbooking

Apples and pears getting sauced simultaneously.

Fresh salsa.  Bex said it tasted good - if you trust her judgement and palette.

Check out the cool visual effect of hail hitting the water.

Awesome fall color - not sure if this was before or after the hail.

The little bit that I saw of the city of Baltimore where the SWE conference was.

The company's recruiting team at the SWE conference.

Confusion in the Baltimore airport.

Crazy scrapbookers.

Burlington, IA - home of the railroad company, not the coat factory.

Fresh pesto made from some of Bex's fresh basil.  It tasted pretty decent on some chicken.

Bex kayaking in November.

Turtle!

 That's it folks - four months in 12 pictures and ten bullet points.  :-)

Signage

A month or so ago a sign was posted in the lab at work that said this:  "The lab is now serving Folgers Classic Decaf".  Previously they only had regular available.  This made me wonder if they were totally doing away with all regular, or if they were doing both or what.  However, I didn't dig into it too much since I generally don't drink coffee.

Apparently enough other people wondered as well because it has now been modified to say this:  "The lab is now offering Folgers - Regular (Red Packets) Classic Decaf (Green Packets).  I think that cleared it up.  Engineers are sticklers for details.....not so much about presentation though.

2014 Bushel Basket List, Weeks 3 & 4

Checked off the list:  #8 - Play a new board game or card game.  The same evening that I went ice skating I also played the card game "Blink" - it brags that it's the world's fastest game, and it is pretty fast all right.  If you like the game Spoons, then this game might be right up your alley.

New Digs at Arnie

Here's the new place of work.  It took me less than a day to unpack what took me 2.5 days to pack.  So far I've only sat there for about half a day though due to winter weather conditions.  I think I'll be able to make it in tomorrow.  I'm crossing my fingers I will be.  I miss my ergonomic chair and some of my tools and the really fast internet.

New desk before moving day.

Looking over the sea of cubes so you can get perspective on how tall the walls are (or aren't).

Arnie - yes, it looks like a prison, but luckily I sit near one of those windows.

Moved in!

End of An Era

Our cubicles needed to be packed up by 2:00 PM on Friday so the movers could move our stuff to the different building over the weekend.  I sat in that building for 11 years and one week.  It is the end of an era.  Good-bye SJTC and hello Arnie.

You might remember that a new muffin was put on test on the 13th.  Well, about two days before the move it molded inside the Ziploc bag.  And thus the mystery was solved.  The catalyst for the mold is holding the moisture in.  If you let the moisture evaporate, then it becomes like a crouton before it can mold.  At least in the climate here.  All muffins from the experiment went in the trash at the end of the day last Thursday. *tear*

What does the muffin experiment tell us?  It tells us the test setup greatly influences the results.  I never saw it, but remember the big deal about the "Supersize Me" movie?  I was told that they left McDonald's french fries out and they never went bad.  Well....what were the test conditions?  Maybe they were like the muffins where they were exposed to the air.  Then it's not all that surprising that they didn't go bad.  Key learnings:

1. If someone is going to make a statement, do they have data to support it?
2. If they have data, what was the test setup, and how might the test setup have influenced the results?
3. Do the results make sense, and is any data from the results being hidden or discounted for invalid reasons?

I feel that a lot of people who "share" news articles on facebook don't abide by these key learnings.  They just "share" stuff that agrees with what they think regardless of any supporting data or lack of supporting data.  Sometimes it drives me a little bit nuts when people do that.  Research is just going down the tubes.

The move.....it took me about 2.5 days to pack my stuff.  The guideline was to have 4-6 boxes for the move (including your monitors and docking station).  I had 19.  But......3 of those boxes were going directly to storage, and 2 of those 3 were "fresh" with 43 new prototypes that arrived two days before the move.  So I don't really count those.  Plus, 2 of the other 16 were someone else's boxes that I was doing a favor for by moving them.  So that brings the total down to 14.  Two of those 14 were computer stuff like my monitors and docking stating.  Two or three of those boxes also weren't full size.  And......I fit all but one of those boxes in my new cube.  I had to send one box to storage.  Not bad, eh?

When I opened one of my boxes this morning, I found a note that said, "Mel, The guideline was to have 6 boxes, not 16.  You read the memo wrong."  That cracked me up.  It wasn't signed, but I found out later that Krix put the note in there.  I may have been the heaviest traveler.  The other guy who was likely to have as many boxes as me only had 9, but that was because he did a double purge.  He did one at Thanksgiving and then another one when we moved cubes.  I did a mini purge at Christmas, but apparently not enough.

Some photo documentation:

All packed up and ready to go.  Well, almost.  I still had the muffins on display.  After I took this picture, I threw them away.  A co-worker also donated a dried grapefruit that he had at his desk.

After the movers left - a barren cube.

If you look closely, you can see where it has started to mold.  Possibly where someone put their finger?  Thus we bring the muffin experiment to an official close.

Retiring Stuff

Remember how I talked about retiring my wallet?  Well, new year, new stuff!  Out with the old, in with the new!  Around the new year I was in a "trashy" mood, so I decided to retire a few oldies but goodies.

For example, this shirt.  I bought it in my second or third year of college at the RCC Western Store - "a touch of western class - a look that's made to last".  And last it did.  This shirt has been a staple in my work wardrobe, and I also like it for airplane travel because it was long sleeved and helped keep out the airplane drafts, but it was light enough that if you flew to a warm destination you didn't feel like you were sweltering when you exited the plane.  It hasn't gone in the trash, but I officially removed it from its hanger.  It may need to make a farewell trip to a warm destination in a little over a month and stay there forever.

Next up:  my Lego man key chain.  I got him a year or two after I started working.  He experienced several dismemberments and his face kind of came off.  Now the lady at the Y will have to identify my keys by some other memorable item.

And the wallet.  It's 10 or 11 years old.  I really hated to give it up.  I thought I might have to retire it about 2.5 years ago when it got drenched, but it held together after it dried.  However, I think the time had come. My credit card corners were nearly starting to come through the leather, and the stitching was hanging by a thread, so I retired it.  It seemed appropriate to do it on New Years Eve.  There may have been a small ceremony that included a eulogy.

This week I got lots of practice at throwing stuff out as I prepared to move cubicles.

Small New Year Celebration

Due to weather and the awkwardness of it falling on Wednesday, the New Year celebration that I had planned to have at my house turned into a party of two.  Uncle Bex still braved the roads, but the other guests decided to stay home.  But don't worry, we made the best of it even though we did have to play two-person games.  We managed to stay up until midnight, but just barely. The highlights:

1. Rice Krispie bars (with various toppings of Nutella or peanut butter or both)
2. Sledding
3. Kinda-sorta went snowboarding (the hill wasn't quite steep enough, and the snow was a bit sticky)
4. Playing games - Bex beat the pants off me when we played Boggle, I beat the pants off Bex when we played Scrabble, and it was nearly a draw playing Stratego
5. Checked out the lighthouse in all its icy glory
6. Went to Target and T.J. Maxx
7. Shoveled snow
8. Retired my wallet (more on that in a later post)
9. Harassed others about not coming to the party
10. Delicious meals (if I do say so myself) that included ribs, roasted potatoes, fancy salads, chicken curry, guacamole, bacon, and smoothies.  Not all in the same meal....duh!

Some pictures:

Out with the old and in with the new (tear)

  

A mean game of Stratego

Goofing around while sledding

Uncle Bex goofed around too

Almost looks like Colorado, doesn't it?

Icy pier

Contemplating a polar plunge

Good breakfast food

One of our delicious suppers

Potato Christmas

For Christmas I went to the state famous for potatoes.  It was good, but not a super long trip.  Even though when I arrived I felt like I would have plenty of time to chill out, the time flew by.  Here are the highlights.

1. Seeing Ananias, Pops, and Ma
2. Time with Bethro and some good talks with her
3. Playing games with some smart older people - Cranium, Take Two, Trivial Pursuit
4. Seeing many of my aunts and uncles (J&E, Geneva, Marie, and even Alice)
5. Snowboarding one day - not the best snow, but we did find a crazy tree adventure
6. Computer shopping for Pops - we had some success there.
7. Playing the Game of Things - super funny when you have a lot of people to play it, and especially if many of the people playing have similar senses of humor.
8. We did a little reliving of last year's Christmas highlights:  limeade, chips, and salsa
9. Delicious homemade gingerbread
10. Delicious Christmas dinner
11. I am now the (somewhat) proud owner of a scarf.  The price was right, and some people were very persuasive.  :-)
12. A visit to REI - I got a new sweater and a new belt.  You can never go wrong with a visit to REI.
13. Indian buffet for lunch one day

Let's end on a good number, shall we?  Here are a couple pictures - I didn't really take very many.  And don't tell my boss, but I may have skipped working a couple hours that week....but probably one of my 60 hour weeks in October makes up for it.

Myself and Bethro playing some Cranium - this is also proof that I do sometimes wear my new clothes purchased at Thanksgiving time.

The adventure through the trees.  If you look very  closely, you can see Devon.  If it looks like more scrub brush than snow for snowboarding, you would be correct.  We probably spent more than 30 minutes trying to navigate through here.

Scenery from the Bogus Basin ski hill.

Observation and Cubicles

This is another observation about my cube mate Kadmium.  I have noticed in the past that when he's feeling stressed he tends to talk more during the day, and often he seems to spend more time obsessing/worrying about little problems or potential problems at work.  My theory is this may be his coping mechanism.

Anyway, I think he's been feeling stressed the last week or so because I've been noticing this behavior more.  I think part of it is that Rickshaw (one of my other cubies) now has a different manager and has moved to a different group and thus was required to move to a different cubicle in a different building.  They were good friends and usually spent several minutes in a day chatting about stuff.  I'm not sure how life is at home for Kadmium, but there is also stress in the form of all of us moving cubicles and buildings about a week from now.

Right now we sit in a quad of cubicles with six foot walls around the quad.  Our new desks are from the "open workspace" concept where the highest walls are maybe four feet, and there will probably be 50-100 people in a big room.  As one might expect, many employees are not huge fans of this.  When we went from the dual cubes to the quad cubes there was a big uproar about distractions, loss of storage space, etc.  Now we're moving to the open workspace concept, and there is an even bigger uproar and bigger concerns about noise and distractions.  There is a lot of cynicism going on.  There are worries (many of them valid) about noise levels, visual distractions, privacy, storage space, etc.  What further rubs people the wrong way is that they asked for our input on what we did or didn't want for cubicles and then proceeded to ignore most of our input.

We even had a meeting this week where they had a "change management" consultant talk to us about how to handle change and the four stages of change that people go through.  They also had us list all our concerns and said they would address them, and then they pretty much went on to kinda-sorta cover a couple of our concerns and questions, but mostly they didn't address them and just told us we needed to learn to adapt and find what works for us.  Yeah.  Thanks for the advice.  Now let me go find the cheese that someone moved.  This is pretty much what the diagram looked like.  We were encouraged to work through all the steps and get to the commitment stage.  Don't get stuck in a stage!  We must have been one of the less polite groups because one of the people in our group was pulled aside at the end and asked why our group was so hostile toward change.  One guy's thought on that was to ask, "why are you imposing this hostile change on normal people?"

How do I feel about this?  I do have some of the same concerns about noise, distractions, and storage space.  But I think I will learn to deal with them.  I kind of like the building I work in, but a different building might keep things interesting.  The building we're moving to does not have a cafeteria, which I will definitely miss.  I am looking forward to sitting in the same building as the software engineers again.  I also get a window seat!  Hooray for sunlight!  A new cube is also a new opportunity to try to do some more ergonomic things with my desk arrangement to help keep my neck tension at a lower level.  I get a new wireless phone headset.  The furniture is new.  I will be sitting next to my boss.  Like someone said, I may end up hearing more things than I want to sitting that close to him.  The drive to work will be about the same distance but in the opposite direction.  This is a bit of a bummer because the road is much busier, so it may make it more difficult to ride my bicycle to work in the summer.  Not that I did that all that much last summer anyway.

I have been surprised by Kadmium's reaction to all of this.  I figured he might take all of this in stride because he's worked for several companies in his career and has probably seen it all.  But he seems to be very opposed to the open workspace concept.  In fact, many of the older people in the group are - possibly because they already saw it fail in the past.  One of Kadmium's most recent comments was, "it makes me feel a little less valued to move into a space like that."  He's probably been working as an engineer for close to 30 years, and at one company he even had his own office with walls and a door.  And he's probably had his own individual cubicle.  And now he's reduced to an open office workspace.  It all depends on where you started from, huh?  I've always sat in a cubicle, so this open workspace doesn't seem like it's that big of a change or downgrade for me.  I'm slightly optimistic that I might like sitting in a place with new furniture and sitting next to a window.

Look for an update on January 27th......or maybe some time that week.

2014 Bushel Basket List, Weeks 1 & 2

Checked off the list:  #13 - Go ice skating.

M&M had a gtg at their house on January 3, so I went over there, and we skated on their frozen over pond.  Skating outside in the open air is so much cooler (literally and figuratively) than skating in a rink.  Especially when the temperatures are near zero.

Another Experiment

January 13th - it's muffin time!  This year I'm testing Krix's theory that the muffin will mold if it's put in an enclosed space.  So we'll see.  Oh, and check out the muffin that has been on test here at home for a year.  It's pretty much the same results as the ones at work.

New muffin on test in a Ziploc bag.

The home test 2013 muffin survived until 2014.

This video is really tiny, but look what SIL-Lan sent me today.  Doesn't that just melt your heart?

Marriage Contemplation

As you may or may not know, I sit next to Kadmium at work.  He's a middle-aged guy with a wife and grown kids.  He's a pretty good-natured guy.  He likes to laugh and joke most days.  He has a serious side too (most engineers do), but in general he's pleasant.  It's also not a secret that his wife is a bit of an invalid.  She has some kind of auto-immune disorder where she gets sick easily, and because of that she's not able to work very much.  Related to that or perhaps because of that or maybe totally unrelated, she can also tend to be depressed.  According to Kadmium, his wife is also not very logical, which is probably one of the things he loves about her and one of the things that annoys him I think.

I would say on average, at least once a week he'll get a phone call from her during the day.  This week it was in the middle of the day when it was really cold here, and their furnace had quit working for some reason.  He seemed to know why and had some suggestions on what she could do in the mean time to stay warm until he got home to fix it, but apparently she wasn't receptive to the suggestions.  I could tell by his tone of voice that he was getting frustrated, but I usually admire his composure and compassion when he's talking to her.  I expect he's probably had some practice in being patient.

She often likes to call him right as he's shutting his computer down before he leaves for the day.  He's trying to get out of work quickly, and then she wants to spend time discussing what they should eat for supper.  He'll suggest something, and apparently that's not what she feels like eating, so then I'll hear him say something like, "Well, if that's what you want to do, then let's just eat that.  I'm sorry, but I have to go now.  The car pool guys are waiting."  Kadmium has commented once or twice in the 2 or 3 years I've sat next to him that it's a rare thing that his wife is in a good mood when he arrives home.

All of these events (plus some other recent observations and stories) started me wondering how people end up in situations and marriages like those.  Before they got married, did Kadmium truly know what his wife was like?  Was it less pronounced because she was healthier?  Was she perfectly healthy and then suddently became ill?  Did he see the signs of her personality but think they could be improved?  I wondered for a long time until recently I overheard him telling Rickshaw that "She can be a lot of fun.  The only problem is that's only about 10% or 20% of the time.  Before we got married I could kind of see how she was, but I thought it was situational and that if she got out of the situation she was in, she would change and improve."

I'm sure that statement I overheard over-simplifies things, and I just caught the tail end of the conversation.  But it just makes me realize again how serious the vow "in sickness and in health" is.  And how serious it is to really know the person you marry.  And how you will still need the strength of God in your marriage even if you do know them because things will happen that you couldn't even imagine.  Or maybe it's not a serious thing to truly know the person you marry because some things will be a surprise anyway!  Just kidding....I really do think it is important, but I suppose one shouldn't expect they will know everything about their spouse.

Those are your serious thoughts from an amateur for a Thursday.

Goings On

I've gotten a little bit negligent on the posts here.  There has been a fair amount going on, but at the same time I've also been super motivated with other projects and didn't get around to posting.  And now I'm almost overwhelmed with all my post ideas, I don't know where to start.

Here's one place I can start:  robotics.  That's right - the season started on Saturday.  This year's game is called aerial assist.  Here's the link to the game this year.  The first couple days of meeting has been hampered by the weather, but I think we'll still have a good season.

Speaking of weather, we had snow on Sunday accompanied by high winds on Monday and Tuesday.  Allegedly the building at work was open on Monday, although employees were strongly encouraged to work from home.  And on Monday there were no cafeteria, reception, or mail services.  And most of the doors were blown shut with snow, and the parking lots were partially cleared.  So were the buildings really open?  No, but this way they can say it is and make their mobile workforce work from home.  And thus the death of the working person's "snow day" was complete.  At least for office people.  Teachers still get snow days.  Around here, they've had three snow days so far this week.  Luckily I could go to the office today before cabin fever completely took hold.

Even though it has been kind of cold, I'll take 0 or 10 degrees over 32 degrees any day.  Especially if the sun is shining when it's 0 degrees.  Thirty-two degrees is usually so dreary and damp and bone-chillingly cold.

That's it for now.  Many summary posts and a couple thought-provoking posts coming soon (hopefully).

2014 Bushel Basket List

Since Avis started me on doing some kind of blog project every year since 2011, I've been kind of liking that.  I have decided upon the 2014 project.  I have created a 2014 bushel basket list.  For you non-farmers, you might call it a bucket list.  There are 26 items, which nicely results in documenting an activity on a bi-weekly basis.  Bi-weekly is a very annoying word, by the way.....because it can mean once every two weeks or twice a week.  I'll let you do the math and figure out which one I'm referring to.

Uncle Bex says I should reveal my list now so that I don't get all squirrelly at the end of the year and try to change my bucket items on the fly.  So here it is, not in order of importance and not in order of planned execution:

1. Go kayaking on a river or lake I’ve never been on before
2. Go cross country skiing
3. Go snowboarding
4. Visit a foreign country
5. Go to a 'vention I’ve never been to before
6. Play volleyball
7. Play softball
8. Play a new board game or card game
9. Go on a hike longer than 5 miles
10. Visit TJ in SC (or wherever she's living)
11. Go scuba diving at least once
12. Go to Cedar Point
13. Go ice skating
14. Run in a 5K event
15. Go to GR Art Prize
16. Go to a concert
17. See a musical
18. Invite my work friends over for a game night
19. Have a “girls weekend” at my house.
20. Invite DEA over for a meal
21. Learn Portuguese (to a basic level at least)
22. Make homemade granola bars
23. Start and finish a scrapbook for an overseas trip.
24. Read the bible chronologically.
25. Make beef brisket.
26. Make and grow a portable vegetable garden.

I know there are a few "bunnies" in the list, but you need a few of those for the ordinary weeks, right?  Oh, and it is allowable to "get ahead" on the list and then save the pictures until I have a slow week.  Just sayin'.  It's my posts and my list, so I guess I get to make the rules.

2013 Journal of Amazing Things - Week #52

Things I found amazing this week:

1.  Time with extended family - we relived a little bit of Mexico by drinking some limeade and eating chips and salsa.

2.  My aunts - they're more than twice as old as me, but they can still whip my butt in a game of "Draw Two / Take Two / Fast Scrabble."