Most Awesome Thing Ever!

Last night I saw the most awesome thing ever. A "more you know..." psa with The Office's Rainn Willson about the dangers of Bears. Go to The Office to watch this one and more (there are a bunch). HI-freakin'-larious!

Pet Peeve: The CC Power Trip

If you are going to write someone an accusatory e-mail and "cc" that person’s supervisor, her supervisor, and a third interested party, then you should also "cc" all those people when you write back to that someone to apologize because you were totally wrong in your accusations.

Thanks for the well wishes

Thanks for the well wishes. I am feeling a bit better and my paper is resembling something that could possibly-in-the-near-future be a paper worth turning in.

Nonsensical Ramblings of a Sick Person

Feeling ill last night, I decided to take my temperature, and to my dismay I had a fever. I cannot remember the last time I've had a fever, so this was a bit unnerving and uncomfortable for me. SP showed her nurturing side and gave me some medicine and water to bring down said fever and to help me feel better. It helped the matter, but didn't fix it. This morning I again woke with fever, sore throat and cough. I couldn't get into my doctor, so off to Urgent Care I hurried.

The staff at Urgent Care were extremely friendly, but I was there for four hours! Four hours, and all told I spent only 35 minutes talking to anyone. Still, it was less time than I would have spent at the ER and my insurance covers it (unlike if I have to be rushed to the hospital next door to my house, but that is another boring story).

The people at Urgent care are all very nice, and so I hate to say anything bad about it. I was, afterall, given drugs that promise to make me feel better.

The upside to my 4 hour stint in Urgent Care is that I made great headway in reading Life of Pi. It has really picked up speed, and as SP and fomerSquishy have mentioned, it is a book worth reading.

Being sick has also really put a damper on my ability to finish may paper that I need to mail to my professor ASAP . Procrastination has never gotten the best of me like this before. Time is a formidable foe - I just hope it doesn't win this round!

Standing the Test of Time

I love the oldies and I'm not afraid to say it! In highschool the oldies station was number 1 on my "preset" and I listened to it every day on my way home from school. I just can't get enough of them. Well, with my new iPOD I find that I listen to the radio less and less when I'm in my car, and I miss my oldies. So, the other night I put some of my favorite olidies on Cooper. I got some Peter Paul and Mary, some Hermen's Hermits, and some Turtles. I also put on a few songs by the totally awesome Sam Cooke. All of his songs are great, but a couple of my favorites are Another Saturday Night, Only Sixteen and Cupid. He has alot of other popular songs (Chain Gang, Wonderful World, Twistin' the Night Away....). If you don't have music by him, you are missing out. NPR has had several stories about him, and if you haven't heard them I suggest you check them out. The link takes you to one story, and you can acces the others from there.

What is so great about Wednesdays @ 8:00?

Before this week my Wednesday 8:00 timeslot was already over booked. Lost and Veronica Mars both come on at this time. Veronica Mars reruns on Saturdays, so major scheduling problems were avoided. Now, I find that Gilmore Girls has moved from Tuesdays at 7p.m. to this Wednesday times slot. What the hell? Lost, well lost out. There is no contest between that over hyped show in which nothing happens, often not even a new episode and my G-girls. Now, I find thatoriginal recipe Law & Order is also moving to Wednesdays at 8a.m. Why are the TV gods doing this to me?

The Phrase in Question

The only thing that can get me out of my cold prickly slump is a Wordy Wednesday. Let’s try an installment of "The Phrase in Question" on for size today.

Once in a Blue Moon

Meaning: Happens on rare occasions; not common.
Example: I’ll have a hankering to watch a science fiction movie once in a blue moon.
Provenance: Several - see below

• Most commonly, a blue moon means: the second full moon that fall in the same calendar month. It is very rare for a blue moon to occur – they only happen about once every 2 ½ years, hence the phrase.
  
• Dating back further to the 1800s, the Maine Farmers Almanac, and the Christian Ecclesiastical Calendar, a blue moon can also mean the third moon in a season that has four full moons. Each month has a full moon making a grand total of 12 moons a year, but some years there are thirteen moons causing one season to have an extra (4th) moon. The third moon is called the "blue moon." It was important for the Ecclesiastical calendar that they keep track of the extra moon so they could "skip it" in their worship calendar. Otherwise, everything would get off track.
  
• The trend of calling the moon blue dates back to a 1528 proverb. "If they say the moon is blue,We must believe that it is true." Apparently, it meant that something was absurd because it’s absurd to call the moon blue, or something…This excites me not at all, but it might strike someone’s fancy.
  
• On occasion, the moon has appeared blue to sky gazers because of volcanic eruptions or forest fires. According to the website, The key to a blue moon is having in the air lots of particles slightly wider than the wavelength of red light (0.7 micron)--and no other sizes present. This is rare, but can happen (1883 Indonesian volcano Krakatoa eruption). To read more about this phenomenon, go here.

This blog post has been brought to you by "Wordy Wednesdays"

At the end of my rope

We are currently gearing up for our biggest event all year here at work – things are very busy around the office. So why, then, am I blogging? How do I have time to do this? I’ll tell you: I am waiting… waiting for other people to get me information that I need to do the next task on my very long list of tasks. Being an impatient person, this is driving me crazy.

This week, I am waiting for volunteer lists and requests from my committee member to come in so I can finish assigning volunteer jobs to our devoted workers. I then need to make sign-in sheets, instruction cards, mail out specific information about the day, etc. So, do I have volunteer lists? No. Do I have volunteer requests? No. I have sent reminder e-mails, left voice messages, and sent more reminder e-mails and still I wait. Do you know when this information was due to me? The end of February. Yes, that is correct – a month ago! How can people be so inconsiderate? Short of driving to their homes/offices and demanding the information I need at knife-point, I do not know what to do! I am so frustrated!

Although I know it will all come together (it always does), I need to have all this set so I can move on to one of the other umpteen million things we have to do to get ready for this event.

Under the Wire...

It's still Monday, so there is still time for a movie quote. In what movie would you find this quote:

I win! I always win. Is there no one on this planet to even challenge me?!!

This blog post brought to you by "Movie Mondays."

A Great Book

Some of you may know that I took a creative writing/comp class this term. I enjoy writing and editing work in a writing workshop format, so I looked forward to this class. My group was great to work with and we all grew as writers over the eight week course. My professor, however, left little to be desired. He is the sort of professor that reads his own works aloud to the class so we can “oooh” and “awww” at his genius, who asks a question so that he can to hear himself answer it, and who skims the stories you hand in instead of actually critiquing them. I did not especially care for my professor's teaching style, but I don't think he was a bad guy and he clearly loves the craft of writing; he simply did not live up to my expectations.

Still, I enjoyed the class and spent a great deal more time on it than I have in any other class in my Masters Program to date. On the last day of class, he read to us, not one of his pieces, but a wonderful book by Sharon Creech called Love That Dog. The intended audience is children aged 8-12, but I think it can be appreciated by anyone, certainly by anyone with a love for reading, writing, poetry and/or dogs. If you go to Sharon Creech's website you can read a chapter of the short book or hear an excerpt read. I highly recommend it, or better yet - go to the library/bookstore and read it. Better still, go the library/bookstore and have someone read it to you. It is a short book and one that is meant to be read aloud.

Jeremy Northam

I love Jeremy Northam. After looking at his filmography, I realized that I have not seen very many movies with him in them, and need to add some to my movie que. The following, however, are good movies that I have seen with him and that he is sexy in. I highly recommend checking them out.


Emma - He plays Mr. Knightley. After watching this movie with a bunch of friends in college, my friend Kelly spoke for us all when she said, "Everyone needs a Mr. Knightley for her very own." Although (admittedly) he is no Mr. Darcy, he comes as close a second as anyone has a right to do.

The Winslow Boy - He plays the a lawyer in a movie set in England in the early 20th centery. The Winslow family's youngest son is expelled from boarding school - why I can't remember. Anwya, the trial, etc is the back drop for the story, but the real story is in the family and his falling in love with the daughter. I really like this movie - it is sweet.

The Net- Not the best movie ever made, but it lands Jeremy Northam on the "Sexy Psyco" list.

He's also in Gosford Park. A moive I was not fond of, but many people like.

Where the Truth Lies

Last night Panda and I rented Where the Truth Lies staring Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon. The basic story is that Colin and Kevin's character's (Vince and Lenny), an entertainment duo from the 50s – think Martin and Lewis, are on top until a the dead body of a girl is found soaking in their hotel suit's bathtub. Fifteen years later, the mystery is still unsolved, so a young journalist, obsessed with the duo since childhood, gets a book deal and sets out to solve the puzzle.

This movie was a complete and total let down. In the end, we found our selves bored by the uncovered truth. Not only was the movie a crescendo with no real climax, but we felt it was confused about where it was trying to go - making us confused and annoyed in the process. Several times during the movie, parallels were drawn between the young journalist and the woman who was killed in the fifties, but those parallels went nowhere, and in the end seemed pointless.

In the end, we just didn't care and wished we'd gotten Junebug instead.

This blog post brought to you by "Movie Mondays"

So satisfying

Today at work I made my daily "to do" list. Usually I have one or two things left on the list by day's end, but not today! No, today I completed everything on my list. It is a really satisfying feeling!

fuzzy origins

For my class,I have to write a paper about my name: its origins/meaning and how it does or does not fit me.

We are supposed to use our full name, but my last name, Fuzzy, has no origins that I can find. See, when my ancestors came over to this country Fuzzy was not their name, so it is pretty much made up, and although other people have my last name, their not really part of my heritage making me less than motivated to search for the meaning behind the name.

I also can't find much about what our name pre-Fuzzy meant, probably because I'm unsure how it was spelled and it seems to be somewhat uncommon. So, instead, I am either taking the meanings of the first names of either Bridet and Michael (the first of our line of Fuzzy's to come over to the US of A, or I'm going to take the names of my mom, g-mom, great g-mom, all they way up to my great great g-mom Bridget and describe what those names mean and how they do or do not make up me. The wierd thing about that is that I'm following the paternal line, but the wives who married them - I guess that's cool becuase each of those women have added to the Fuzzy line. I don't know... we'll see how it turns out!

Learn something new every day

So, I logged on to iTunes to download the totally awesome song "Travelin' Thru" by the equally awesome Dolly Parton (which is currently a free download), when I clicked on the "beta" recommendations. I thought this was just a list of songs that iTunes spotlights. No - it is a list of songs just for me! I might have been tipped off by the words, "just for you!" next to the "beta" sign, but since I've only just started browsing and purchasing from the iTunes store, tonight was the first I noticed. Anyway, iTunes now has recommendations of songs I might like based on said purchases. And you know what? They are pretty much on-target. Unfortunatly, my last $.99 in my iTunes account was spent on Kansas's song "Dust in the Wind" so I couldn't take them up on any of their suggestions. Not unfortuante is that I did purchase "Dust in the Wind," which is a great song.
Highlander: The Series fans may remember it from when Tess died on the show. Following her death, the song was played often - usually while Duncan was depressed over the death of his love. Since I never loved Tess, I was happy enough to see her go, but even more happy to hear this song. I love Highlander and I love this song.

Classic Movies of My Generation

These are the movies from my childhood that are Classics and should be seen be seen by any self-respecing child of the 80s/early 90s. This not just list of my favorite movies, although I do love all these as I watched them time and time again growing up. In fact some of my favorite childhood movies (Men at Work, The Pirate Movie) did not make the cut because although they are AWEsome with a capital AWE, they are not classics.

Movies on my Classic's List:
Summer School
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
War Games
Clue
Breakfast Club
Adventures in Babysitting
The Princess Bride

I like to vacuum, I like to boogie

The vacuum I purchased shortly after Panda and I moved into our carpet covered apartment kicked the bucket. First the fancy tools stopped sucking up crumbs and cat hair off the couch, and very recently the actual vacuum took to laughing meniacally as I tried in vein to vacuum any speck of dirt or dust, no matter how small. I will not stand for a vacuum that does not work, so last weekend, after reading dozens of epininos and customer ratings (dozens of them!), I decided on the Bissell Lift-off. I've never had a Bissell, but the complaints that people had about it were minor (too heavey - suck it up people, it's not a riding vacuum) and Target was having a sale.

The verdict: It works wonders! I vacuumed our supposedly clean carpet and would have been disgusted by all that the new vacuum sucked up if I had been so impressed. It is awesome, and our carpet has sping to it once again. I love it! love it! love it! love it!

Crap-assed CD players

Today I'm working on the most mundane of my job duties, so I thought I'd pop in the Slater Kinney mix FishFrog so selflessly made for me. Unfortunatley, my crappy CD player will not recognize the CD. I am bummed.