Twilight

Well, my friends and I went to see the movie last night. It was of course a Monday night, the only school night for the kids in this county this week, so no one was there. I thought some parts were kind of annoying, but on the whole it was a good movie. I was especially anxious to see the Meadow scene since I'd heard so many terrible things about it. Hello Sand Art. I'm excited that they are going to make the next one. Some people have said they need to get on with it so that the actors don't age, but let's face it. They didn't start with 12 year olds, so the aging that any of these actors do is going to be easily covered with make up. The Jacob character on the other hand... we'll that's going to be a problem. It'll be interesting to see how they do that. It seems to me that Edward was supposed to be pretty tall too, and he wasn't that tall in the movie. We'll see. So yeah, good movie. Go see it if you have not already.
In other news, is anyone else really annoyed that Harry Potter is not coming out until July now?!

Are ya kidding me?

So Dish Network was very prompt at getting us a new receiver. We got it set up, and shipped our old one back, and life was back to normal for 4 days, aside from Nate still from time to time mentioning that he can't watch Wallace and Grommit. Then came this morning. I turn on the tv and the same problem has occurred. I call Tech support, and they are going to send us a new receiver. If I have the same problem next Wednesday again, well, I'm going to march down to the dish network office and demand answers! It just seems kind of fishy for it to be a coincidence, ya know what I mean?

Life's annoyances

Does anyone know how to get super glue off of fingertips?
On the other hand, don't thieves usually put superglue on their fingertips so that they don't leave prints? This could have possibilities...

My New Weight Loss Plan

So, after I ran my 5K, I pretty much stopped running. Jesse was getting ready for his half marathon, and so he was taking all of the running time, and well, I just really don't enjoy running THAT much. So I gained back all of the weight I had lost and more. So just recently I started running again when I saw that I had reached my heaviest non-pregnancy weight. My new plan was not to lose x amount of weight, it was not to run in such and such a race. I do still have those goals, but my new immediate goal is to lose one pound a week. That's it. That's all I have to do in order to achieve my goal. So far I lost 2 lbs the first week, and 3 lbs this week. (So the next 3 weeks are free since I'm already up 3 lbs. )
I figure that the Baltimore Running festival is a year away, so if I can keep this up for a year, I can lose 50 lbs while training for the (half) marathon. So there you have it. All I need to do is keep losing 1 lb. I found that it is actually quite motivating. I can still have the occasional treat, but it does keep me thinking, if I eat this, is this what will push me over my 1 lb weight loss. If I don't run today, will it keep me from losing the weight. I'm hoping that I'm still 10 lbs away from plateauing, but in all reality, I am only 4 lbs away from the point that I always have trouble going under, and that motivates me even more. The last 10 lbs came on quickly and recently, so those will the the first to come off, but the next 40 lbs have been there for many years, so I'm really going to have to work on those. We'll see. Hopefully by having this goal in mind I will keep things in check this holiday season.
Speaking of Holiday Season, and weight loss, the only nice thing about Christmas coming right after Halloween is over is that the Christmas candies are already out. Yesterday I went to the grocery store, and they had candy cane Hershey's Kisses out. Those are the best Hershey's Kisses in creation, followed closely by the coconut ones that come out at Easter. It was bliss to find them. I can start nice and early this year.

Technology

So 20 years down the road some things are going to be very different around here, and our kids will never be able to comprehend how hard we have it these days.
For instance, they will not be able to comprehend having to have actual discs to listen to music or watch movies. They will not know the heartache of having to learn to refold a map. (and read it on your own.) I think mostly thought, it's going to be television that will be different. They will not know about having to wait patiently for your favorite show to be on, and then actually being in front of the tv at that specific time. I think that "on demand" is the future of television, and it's going to change how we watch tv, and what we watch. I think that out of all of the advances in television, the most life changing one has been the invention of the DVR, or TiVo if you will. It's one of those things that once you have it, you do not know how you ever lived without it. Nate has had this luxury his entire television viewing life. He doesn't really understand when I tell him that he has to watch a certain thing at a certain time. Or when he wants to watch an episode of Curious George that was on yesterday, but we didn't record it, it's hard for him to understand that he can't watch it again. It changes the way that you view things too. I think that it is turning us into a very inattentive society. Think about it, how many times have you been listening to the radio, or watching a movie in the theater, and you missed something, and wanted to rewind? It happens to me all of the time. That is because I can rewind live tv.
Well, it is because I COULD rewind live tv. This morning I was sadly informed that my dvr has died. Apparently there is no hope for it. Now, fortunately for me, since it is a dvr, and owned by Dish Network, and the such, they will just ship me out a new one free of charge. BUT IT WILL TAKE 3-5 DAYS!!! Oh, the humanity of it all. How will I survive? Mostly it's sad because Nate has been asking to watch a movie that was recorded on the dvr, and now he'll never have that movie again. (Ok, so that is maybe a little dramatic, but you get the picture.)
So there is my sad story. Mostly it'll be a pain because Nate will continue to ask to watch things again and I'll have to say no. (Ok, so it's only a pain because of the whining, I guess it does have it's upsides.)

ps. Before you send me your condolences, and the such, I guess I should mention that I do still have the ability to watch live tv. It's just the dvr features that are broken.

I voted

I did my civic duty and voted today. I did it after spending the day at my mom's house, so I figured that by the time I got there at 6pm the lines would be out the door. As it turns out, even though I live in the second largest city in Maryland, I still live in the boondocks, and there are no lines out here. I didn't stand in line for even a second. I guess I'm up for a boring evening of waiting for the results to come in. Maybe I'll go to bed early. It'll be midnight out here before all of the polls even close, and that's past my bedtime, so what's the point. I'll turn on the news in the morning.

Project Recap

Ok, so the past week has been a very busy one. It seems that I have been working on projects left and right, but I finally finished them all. The biggest thing that I have been working on was the proton pack for Jesse's Ghostbuster costume. The one that came with the costume was a blow up thing, and it looked pretty lame. So he gathered some images from the internet and I thought that I could make a fairly decent representation with some boxes, toilet paper tubes papier mache and duct tape. It took a lot of thinking about how to get things to work together, and at the end of the day, I probably should not have even bothered with the papier mache and just stuck with the duct tape, but it all worked out ok. There are some parts that don't stay together well, like where the hose for the blaster attaches to the base, but it does pretty well. After it was all finished, I cut some slits in the back and stuffed a child carrier backpack into it. That was actually the hardest part of the whole thing.

Another project was this pinata. This was also a papier mache project. It was a huge hit. Nate helped make the face, and that is why the nose is on top of the eyes. We made this for a party at Nate's friends house. It was actually a great party and pretty much all of Nate's friends were there, and more importantly, pretty much all of my friends were there. Now that most of the kids are in preschool it has been really hard to get a large group of us together. The kids loved to hit the pinata, but I made it a little bit too strong, and it took forever to break it. I guess that's better that it breaking on the first hit though. I've never made one before though, so I had no idea how thick to make it.This is the wall hanging that I managed to finish. Jana gave me the pattern and the star hanger for my birthday this year, and I finally managed to get it done a few days before Halloween. She also gave me a pattern for Thanksgiving and one for Christmas, we'll see how fast those get done.And lastly, this is the quilt that we made for Colleen. This is just the top, Jana is going to quilt it on her mega quilter. Something like this ought to take her like half an hour. Colleen had a little baby boy a few weeks ago, and in the tradition of my quilting group, we made the baby a quilt. I sure hope that right now is not when Colleen decides to start reading my blog.

So on top of all of those things, I have done a little baking for the Witch's Tea Party that Jana had on Halloween Night. It was a lot of fun to just sit there and invite people up for a nice little treat.

Next month I have some holiday sewing to do, both as gifts and I got this kit to make this really cool Christmas Tree hanging. But no proton packs to make, so that makes life a lot easier.