Happy Birfday to Me!

I've had a good birthday so far, considering I am still pretty sick. Apparently, I have this evil cold that does not want to go away. Not sure if it's the same one that's killing people, but I sure felt like I wanted to die several times this week!

John got me Guitar Hero III for the Wii for my birthday, so we've been playing that. He's already beaten it on the easy level (had to battle the Devil while playing The Devil Went Down to Georgia to do it). I had a 90 minute massage at the spa in South Riding followed by a sauna and then got a Carmel Latte at Panera before coming back home. When I arrived home, I was greeted by some cards and calls from family and friends.

Coincidentally, I happened to get another really cool suprise today that just so happened to arrive on my birthday. I got an invitation from Bob LaRose's new company -- to attend the Christmas Party this year. Apparently people from both Bob's old companies and his new company, Agilex, are invited this year so John and I get to have one last Integic blast from the past next month. Pretty cool.

Neti Pot to the Rescue!

John brought me home a nasty cold on his way back from Dallas this weekend. I have been cooped up in the house catching up on episodes of Heroes and Dexter. In order to speed up my healing process, I have jerry-rigged a green tea pot as my new Neti pot. (Don't worry, if you come to my house later on, I will NOT serve you green tea from this pot -- or I'll at least wash it first). What's a Neti Pot? Here's a wonderful you tube demonstration:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQm7YpxgOnA

For the Cat Lovers...

Carnage in South Riding!

I was letting Bailey out to pee a few weeks ago and saw this on my deck railing. It was too amazing not to photograph.

From Baton Rouge to DC

On Wednesday, my best friend from college came to visit me for the first time since our wedding. We managed to have a great time sightseeing some more unique things in the area. A few pictures from her trip are below:



This statue was the suggestion of Gill. It is called "The Awakening" and is on Hains Point in DC. It is actually 5 statues -- looking at them from afar makes it look as though a 75 foot man is coming out of the earth. After Hains Point, we went to the Spy Museum (no photos allowed).

Next stop was the zoo, where we met one of the Panda babies (above) and then went to the Golden Lion Tamarin exhibit to watch Gill in volunteering action. We sat there for 3 hours and watched as the volunteers took "snapshots" of the GLT activities every 15 minutes. Below are 2 of the 6 tamarins that they were tracking.
On Saturday, we decided to go to Mary Baldwin -- the college where we met. It was a very emotional experience for me, as I had not been there since the day I moved out to transfer to Mary Washington. It is amazing how one place can bring back both happy and sad memories. Driving around Staunton after leaving Baldwin, I saw this painted on the side of an old hardware and feed store and thought it needed capturing.

Global Warming with Breakfast!

http://www.wishingfish.com/210597.html

Postsecret Mystery Solved

More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postsecret

Help for Mac Users

One of the things I've come to hate about my mac, is that there is no easy way to quit all open applications at once. After some research, I found this handy little script that I copied into AppleScript, saved as an application and loaded it on my dock. Now, all I have to do is double-click and all my apps shut down at once. Enjoy!

tell application "System Events" to set the_apps to name of every application process whose visible is true and name is not "Finder"
repeat with each_app in the_apps
tell application each_app to quit
end repeat

OH NO!!!!!!!

Postsecret is gone!!! My normal Sunday morning reading material is no more. Does anyone know what happened to it, if Frank is moving it somewhere else, or if someone else will be picking up the cause?

Newest Cake

The below cake was made for Gabe (turning 30) and Aubrey (turning 1) for a luau party. Everything on it is edible, including the white chocolate shells. I also made 15 cupcakes for the little ones complete with cocktail umbrella. Enjoy!

Memories.

My cousin Emily brought this picture over to my house a while ago. Apparently, when I was in elementary school, my Mom brought her to visit me and eat lunch with me. I think it's hilarious how thrilled we both looked to be sharing that special moment with each other.

Time Waster

If you are a fan of point and click puzzle games, this is a great site. Beware - only click if you have an hour or two to kill, these are addicting.

Ten Rules to Live By to Achieve ENTJ Success

1. Feed Your Strengths! Give yourself every opportunity to show others your appreciation of a situation and how you could see it through to a good outcome. Take charge where you can make it count.

2. Face Your Weaknesses! Understand you have limits too. Your careful world view is not the whole deal. How things look and feel may not concern you, but they concern many others. Try and allow such things to be and learn from them.

3. Talk Time to Find Out How Others Really Think. You need to drive past your thoughts with others and let their appreciations of a situation reach you at a deeper level. It will then be possible for you to take account of their needs as real world objectives which if included in your ideas will bring greater harmony and quality to life and relationships.

4. Take Time Out To Let The Whole Situation Speak To You. Don't dismiss those abstract and seemingly hard to understand or bothersome aesthetic and feeling judgments coming from others or from inside yourself. Drop everything for a while, stop thinking and worrying and just relax into those ideas and let them speak to you. Perhaps they can be accommodated, perhaps something is hiding in there which offers a new way

5. When You Get Upset, You Lose. Your energy and rational understandings are strong assets, but can be very harmful if they turn against you and leave you with nothing but emotions you cannot deal with. Remember that others cannot always be expected to fall into your ways of seeing, and when your drive to make them do so fails you will suffer feelings of resentment and even abandonment. You cannot deal with the world like this. Moderate your ideas, allow others their spaces, and you will grow.

6. Respect your Need for Intellectual Compatibility Don't expect yourself to be a "touchy-feely" or "warm-fuzzy" person. Realize that your most ardent bonds with others will start with the head, rather than the heart. Be aware of other's emotional needs, and express your genuine love and respect for them in terms that are real to YOU. Be yourself.

7. Be Accountable for Yourself. Don't blame the problems in your life on other people. Look inwardly for solutions. No one has more control over your life than you have.

8. Be Humble. Judge yourself at least as harshly as you judge others.

9. Take a Positive Approach to Differences in People. Don't distress yourself and others by dwelling on what seem to be their limitations. They need you to guide them and you need them to see things through. Try and recognize who can perform the most ably within certain fields outside your own competence. Let the feelings of others become a strength rather than a hindrance to you.

10. Don't Get Obsessed! Recognize the value that personal world has to you, your friends, your family, your own inner sense of self worth and life. Take pride in just being a good person and don’t allow external situations to control you. Try to relax and let the moment belong to the best things you can find in others and yourself. Nothing out there is more important than your own happiness.

Un-Meet Arleigh

Fortunately, with dogs (unlike children), you can always give them back if it doesn't work out the way you expected. John and I spoke about it for about 2 hours tonight and came to the realization that two dogs just wasn't in the cards for us right now in our lives. Arleigh is a handful and is not nearly as intelligent as Bailey. It's very hard to train a dog that has no concept of listening skills or consequences. In fact, every time we'd tell him "no", Bailey would run over and bark to enforce what we were telling him... it was almost as if Bailey knew we weren't getting through to him!

At any rate, the shelter has been very supportive and we'll be bringing him back tomorrow.

It just wasn't meant to be, I guess.

Meet Arleigh

Well, as all of our friends are now entering the phase in their lives where they are having 2 children, John and I decided to get on the bandwagon and adopt our second "child" as well. Meet Arleigh. He arrived home today, 8 months, 39 pounds, 0 ounces.

3rd Grade Racism

I'm sure a lot of you have heard of this widely known 3rd grade experiment conducted by a teacher in the 1970s to help her class learn what it feels like to be discriminated against. I was very pleased to recently find out that Frontline is posting more and more of its episodes online, to include this famous airing.

If you have an extra 45 minutes, I highly recommend watching it.

The Dog and The Bounty Hunter

So I was walking Bailey this morning when a guy in a GTO drove up to me and asked me for directions. (Poor guy -- he had no clue that I am direction challenged). He was trying to get to one of the millions of South Riding streets and I had no idea how to help him. I finally asked him if he had a cell phone so he could call the person he was trying to meet. He then explained that he was a bounty hunter and was looking for a fugitive and giving the guy advanced warning wasn't the best of ideas.

I'm not sure why, but that made my day (although it should have skeeved me out that there was a fugitive in my neighborhood).

First Veggie of the Summer

I planted yellow squash, zucchini, cucumbers and pumpkins this year in my backyard. This was the first zucchini I picked the other day -- not a bad size!

Congrats Em and Jim!

Cogitate

While getting ready for work this morning, I was watching Fox News and they were showing the unveiling of the new White House Press Room. President Bush was there for the ribbon cutting and was joking around with the press about various things. During the briefing, he used the word, "cogitate". I had never heard this word before so I decided to look it up on dictionary.com to see if it was a real word or a "Bushism". Lo and behold, it's a real word! I didn't realize Bush used those!

I wonder if the press will say anything about it...