haulin'

We unloaded the inlaws' moving truck yesterday. Just the 4 of us--two senior citizens, a scrawny chicken-armed Tina and the workhorse, Shawn. It was probably in the low 90's, so thank god for small favors.

Twenty-six feet long, seven feet tall, and about eight feet wide, and absolutely packed to the gills (no, seriously, there wasn't ANY space left). And it only took about 8 hours to unload.

In other news, my sister inlaw had her baby on Saturday evening. a bouncing baby boy, weighing almost 8 lbs. This is good because a few nights ago I had a dream that the baby was a girl and I was not looking forward to returning all the clothes I bought. I can't wait to see some pictures. ;)

Shawn and I also went to our friends' wedding on Saturday. Can I just take a moment to tell everyone how glad I am that it's a three day weekend?

Thoughts for the Week

When the BP exec said something about Obama being un-American my first thought was "Wait, doesn't the B in BP stand for BRITISH? So how is someone complaining about a company, based in a foreign country, un-American? Unless that guy has a VERY different idea than everyone else what is and isn't American."

and

Why haven't football and basketball had big doping scandals like baseball and biking?

The moving of Shawn's parents down here to Texas went well. The only real hitch was the problem with the towing hitch. (haha). Basically the hitch used to tow the car down was attached incorrectly and the Beetle came partially off of the hitch just north of Trinidad, Colorado. So Shawn spent about an hour and a half under the Bug on the side of I-25 banging some U-shaped piece back into shape in order for us to continue on.

The only other hitch would have been when we got to Brownwood, Texas to eat lunch on Wednesday. Unfortunately Underwood's Cafeteria is not open on Wednesdays so we walked some half mile circuitous route to the Schlotzsky's. Mostly because it's impossible to drive a 26-foot truck anywhere unless it's semi/large truck accessible (thus the walking). Also, Brownwood is not pedestrian friendly (thus the circuitous route). We walked down to one traffic light to go to the KFC but because of lack of cross walks, we ended up crossing the street closer to the Schlotzsky's, ergo we ate there instead.

Now, to unload a truck on Sunday. Wish us luck!

No Real Updates

No real updates here. Except for oh MY INLAWS ARE MOVING TO TEXAS. House is empty, and papers signed, truck, car and van are all packed, and money has been wired to Texas for the new house.

We're up here in in windy Colorado and are 45 minutes away from leaving for Texas in the moving truck (yes, we flew up here specifically to help Shawn's 'rents drive the moving truck down to their new house).

Based on how hard the moving guys worked to move some of the furniture, I'm a bit concerned that Shawn and I, and his parents aren't going to be able to move some stuff off of the truck. So, yes, that promises to be fun.

OH AND!

My sister in law is like 20 minutes away from having her second baby. Her due date is on Thursday of this week, but she's probably going to go into labor before that (at least I'm pretty sure she's hoping that's the case).

The Humble Indie Bundle

I heard it first via Wil Wheaton on Twitter. I think Shawn was a little surprised and disappointed when I already knew about it.

"it" is the Humble Indie Bundle.

The bundle is basically 5 games and a short that are "pay what you want." I think they made $1M in the first day or something like that.

Anyhow, we got them (yes, we did pay for them). Shawn's played them more than I have, but World of Goo did entertain me for a while (it's like an engineer's worst nightmare--building trusses with a gooey mass instead of solid bars). I haven't played the other actual games, yet. This is probably because the other games don't necessarily appeal to me--I'm not big into first person shooter games, or really any games where you have to beat a heavy. I'm into games where I solve puzzles. You know, like Myst, Phantasmagoria, and Mystery Case Files. As such, I was obviously most taken with the short game: Samorost 2. The basic concept is that you have to go around and solve various puzzles in order to save the main character's dog, who was dognapped by aliens. It's really quite fun, and challenging, and a lot of times there's some clicking on things just to see what they do as they alternately do things to look pretty (like plants waving in the wind), or sometimes they actually do something useful (like using a plant to wake up an animal).

Anyhow, yes, the Humble Indie Bundle. Check it out.

Bike Ride

Today Shawn and I rode our bikes to the McDonald's for dinner.

Yes, I do realize how funny that sounds. Also, I had a salad, with light balsamic vinaigrette. And of course, the whole reason for going to McDonald's? well, 2 reasons--1) to get points on our May Commuter Challenge which we have been sucking at, and 2) to use the buy one get one free fruit smoothie coupon.

The quickest route to the McDonald's is to go along the busy highway-esque type road (McDo's is about 1 mile away), but because that seems way too dangerous, we decided to go through our neighborhood, under the highway, and then up the non-busy road to the McDonald's. And then back again. All in all the trip was 5.5 miles. Nothing at all like Grinder's 100-mile rides he does frequently.

We are so pitiful.

Documentaries

I really need to stop watching documentaries because they make me sad about the state of the world (heck, even Idiocracy made me sad about the future of the world).

Recently the ones we've been watching have revolved around the big guy picking on the little guy; and with a husband who is a Linux nerd, there's always a conversation about evil corporations. We just watched Food, Inc. and of course one portion of the documentary is about how many corporations there are that package our food. There aren't many. Just like there aren't many electronics corporations, or car corporations. And it's all because capitalism breeds monopolies. Not to say that all organic pasture fed stuff is 100% sustainable at the current levels of consumption of meat and dairy, but still, we can make choices to do better. Just like how we make the conscious choice to not use Microsoft or Apple products at home (though I'm sure both corporations are getting kickbacks from the technologies that we have purchased, so even though our computers don't run their OS's, we're still effectively paying them for the pleasure of not using their systems). Of course making the choice to go localvore is probably a bit more expensive at the onset than the using an Open Source OS, but in the end it might end up being healthier for us.

Also, I gotta remember to grow more spinach, less beets. And I think I'm going to need some fruit trees. Maybe for good measure we should just move off the grid and grow all of our own food...though I'd probably end up becoming vegetarian if that was the case--I just don't think I could kill my own food.

OH! and patenting seeds, and human genes is just downright wrong. How long until we start patenting having children? or every food we eat? This apple is now brought to you by Apple (insert Apple logo sticker on said apple).

Double Flutters

Taken from my Garden Blog and reposted here for the 3 or 4 of you who don't read my garden blog. Hey, this was just too good not to share with everyone.

Meat

Last night we had our first taste of grass fed beef. And it was delicious.

The local Sprouts market has their organic grass fed beef on sale for 40% off so we splurged and bought some meat that was on sale for $7.48/lb. Said meat was from Uruguay. And the corn we had with it came from like California or something. So yeah, the carbon footprint of the meal was kinda dismal.

Just makes me want to get meat from here. Or anything from here.

If you are interested in lowering the carbon footprint of your meals, go to EatWild to find grass fed dairy/eggs/meat near you.

Law-Talking Lady

Since half of my readers are not in the Austin area, I point you to this news article. I will wait while you read it.

Official: Shots fired when census worker visited

That's right. A lawyer went and fired 5 shots at a census worker who showed up at her house. A LAWYER! 1) this wouldn't have happened if she had just filled out the damn sheet (hell, she could have done the same thing my coworker did and claim that "Texan" is a minority if that would make her feel any better). and 2) I did not realize that they were letting nutjobs be law-talking dudes now-a-days.

Texas: The only place where you can be shot at for going door to door.

I'm DYING!

AGAIN! I was fine for a couple of years there, but apparently I'm dying.

Again.

Went to the doctor and my bloodwork came back bad.

Again.

As I said, it was fine for a while there, and then it went down.

Just the usual--high cholesterol, high triglycerides, gain weight, exercise more, eat less calories. I'd like to see the physics for that one.

What they probably should have said was eat more good calories. As in whole foods, not processed foods.

Good thing I already read In Defense of Food and have decided to get rid of all the processed crap, and in order to get Shawn to let me get grass fed beef when we do buy beef, I'm going to have to give up my daily caffeine/corn syrup habit. (though I'm still working on that...I think the easiest way will be to make him read In Defense of Food).

And I decided to up the amount of spinach I grow this next year. More spinach, less beets.

Oh yeah.

And exercise. Boo! Hiss! But I'll do it. Because I don't want to be dying. Again.

Nostalgia Sunday: Falling

I noticed the other day that Snarkymommy hadn't been going through my rotation list meaning that either Amy hadn't been blogging or that her website had changed thus making my feed null and void. I checked out her site, and sure enough it had changed from www. to no www.

As I was catching up on her posts, she had one where her daughter fell down the stairs. And I started laughing. Not because her daughter fell down the stairs, but because it reminded me of my my sister fell down the stairs. And that story is as follows:

My grandparents used to own a cabin in the Colorado mountains. Since they both worked full time jobs, it meant that the only time anyone was at the cabin was MAYBE on the weekends. As such it meant that it was pretty open to having lots of people over when no one else was planning on using it. This usually translated to having extended family over, or my dad would take his coworkers, my parent's marriage encounter group would have a get-away, my uncle's minister friends would have a retreat, etc., etc.

During one of the marriage encounter get aways, someone (and I'm going to blame one of the boys for this), had the brilliant idea of sliding down the stairs on sleeping bags. Still bumpy, but the sleeping bag made it so you continued to slide the whole way. This was shortly upgraded to the twin air mattress. As you can imagine, this was great fun for a bunch of kids to do--toboggan down some carpeted stairs until the wall at the bottom stopped you. The boys and girls were greatly enthralled with this while the adults were all sitting outside on the deck and communing with nature or some shit.

After a while, it became boring to sit on the air mattress and go down the stairs (luge style), and shortly one of the boys decided to go head first (skeleton style). At some point, I started going down head first (great fun!), and started trying to talk my sister into doing it because it was SO much more fun than going down on your butt. She finally agreed to go head first, but only if I went with her at the same time. Since we were both like 5 or 6, it wasn't difficult to fit on a twin mattress. And so we prepped at the top of the stairs, hanging over the edge, getting ready to go. When I gave the word, the boys pushed and Dani and I started down the stairs.

I remember going down a couple of steps and feeling like something caught so I put my hands out and stopped us completely.

Only Dani didn't do the same thing.

Dani slid off the front of the air mattress and then tumbled down the rest of the stairs.

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. All the way to the bottom where she probably landed on her head and her butt hit the log wall.

HiLARious. At least to the rest of us kids.

[aside] Kinda like the time when Shawn and I went backpacking and he twisted his ankle and fell down right after I told him not to twist his ankle, and so I could not stop laughing. [\aside]

We were told, in short order, to stop going down the stairs like that because someone was going to get seriously hurt. So instead we went outside to play with the bows and arrows my grandpa had made for us from aspen seedlings...much safer, I'm sure.

Doctor

So I just got back from the doctor's office. And I always have this one problem when I'm there: After the doctor has seen me, do I wait for the nurse type to come back and get me or do I just see myself out?

Unfortunately, this has been happening since college. It mostly started when I went to the doctor for a sick appointment and happened to mention that my dad had recently been diagnosed with diabetes. The doctor wanted to do a non-fasting blood sugar screen for shits and giggles. So the nurse did the finger prick and then said that the doctor would be in to see me. 40 minutes later the doctor walked by and happened to notice I was still sitting in the exam room and was like "oh my god! I'm so sorry, I didn't realize that the nurse didn't just tell you that your blood sugar was fine. You could have left 40 minutes ago." From that point on I just always left after they did whatever it was they were to do--if it's that important, they'll call me. Or at least that's what I told myself.

Now then, when I started going to the doctor down here, the first nurse flipped out when I walked myself to the lab for the blood-draw and I was apparently "missing" for a little while. (which really? jesus, I was already 22, it's not like I was likely to be kidnapped.) So ever since then, I've waited for direction (whether it comes from the nurse before, or the doctor during, I don't care). Today I waited 15 minutes for the nurse to come back and get me. And I figure it's because the doctor told her that she didn't think I had left the room yet and they should probably check on me to make sure I hadn't passed out or something. If the doctor hadn't noticed, I might have been there until closing and I could have pulled off the Veronica Mars goes searching for medical files thing.

Maybe I should go back to how I did it in Colorado--just walk my own ass down to the lab and leave afterward. They'll call if they need anything.

Houseplants

Houseplants to help you survive the Zombpocalypse. Written by Mr. Subjunctive. pure awesomeness. That and Bond already has half these plants in her office...which makes me think that she knows something I don't.

Eggs & Toast

A few weeks ago, I realized I was hungry for something I had never had before: scrambled eggs on wheat toast. I mentioned this to Shawn at some point and he said I was crazy. "No one eats scrambled eggs ON toast," he said, "they eat scrambled eggs WITH toast. But never ON."

So I decided that I was going to still make my scrambled eggs with toast, and he asked that I make poached eggs with toast. Since I am nothing if not accommodating, I did both.

Guess whose new favorite breakfast item is scrambled eggs ON toast? especially when served with a Kraft American Single?

That's right.

Shawn.

Last time he'll make fun of my food ideas.

Friday

On Thursday night we slept with our bedroom window open. Of course the damn doves started going off super early in the morning. I woke up honest to goodness swearing that my alarm clock ALWAYS made that "Coo coo ca choo" sound.