More stories are coming after Quasimodo leaves our house

I feel guilty that I haven't written more stories from our holidays, but we have been incredibly busy!!  Eventually, you will see all that we have been up to....  Currently though, I am at home sick - make that SICK!  

On top of all the weird medical stuff, I have severe allergy problems, a cold, or both.  I am going through Kleenex like nobody's business.  Today, I needed to return something to Kohl's so that I could have the correct size.  Rather than carry a little pack of Kleenex, I carried a whole box of them in my very large bag...yes, I took the large bag specifically for the Kleenex.  By the time I left, there was a huge wad of used Kleenex in my bag...as well as a large pile next to the bed from last night and near the couch where I sat most of the day.  I keep taking the medicine but am waiting to feel a lot better.  

Originally, I had a runny nose.  Then, I had all of the sinus and allergy problems.  Now, I also have a fever, and I one of my eyes is swelling.  Apparently, the eye that is swollen doesn't open all of the way; Andy was very sweet and demonstrated this look for me.  It reminded me of Quasimodo in the cartoon/animated version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  

Unfortunately, we need to go in to Fort Worth tomorrow; there is a long list of stops.  I am hoping that I can send him in by himself at half of the places and can make the stops where I have to go in really quick.  Yes, I will still have my very large bag to accommodate my box of Kleenex.  I think that I am going to switch to my Kleenex that have Vick's and supposedly kill germs.  

We had intended to go to a New Year's Eve party that our friends are having, but I don't know that we'll make it there.  Today my fever has gotten up to 100 degrees; I'm willing to share my illness with strangers but don't want this to be my gift to our friends!!  So, once we aren't quite as busy, my head is not stuffed with cotton, I don't have to sit with two or three layers covering me with a space heater blowing on me, and my eyes don't water every 3 minutes, I'll try to tell you about our holiday fun.  We hope that you all have a safe and wonderful New Year's Eve!

100th Birthday Party

Andy's great-grandmother, Joyce Taylor (pictured above), turned 100 the week of Christmas so the family threw her a party after church the Sunday before Christmas.  It was held at her church, First Baptist Church, in Mineral Wells.  There was a slideshow put together by Cari Hudkins that showed Joyce throughout her life.  Andy & I made a 3.5 hour playlist of music from every decade of Joyce's life.  We even had some live music performed by some of her friends.  James Upshaw, a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, joined in the group music and even sang a solo for her while playing his guitar.  Joyce was thrilled with all of the wonderful music and great fellowship.  And even though she good-naturedly grumbled about all of the trouble of a party, she basked in all of the attention

Cici & MaryBeth put together this really cute guest book.  It was a photo album that could fit a 6 or 7 sq. inch photo.  They put it together so that when you open it up on the left side you would see a photo of Joyce and on the right side there were the birthday greetings from the guests.

Someone put together wonderful centerpieces for all of the tables.  There were also some accent tables that were beautifully decorated as well!

I would of course love to put many of the wonderful photos that Andy & I took at the party, but we only have 5 or 6 pictures from the party on our camera.  We ended up using others' cameras because they are more advanced than ours.  Here is a picture of the whole family that I stole from Cari's website.  If you'd like to see the slideshow from the party, go to her website, The Hudkins Herald.

Kudo's all of those who helped put the party together and the long list of those who helped put the party room together in those last minutes before guests arrived!!  I had so many people stop to tell me how beautiful everything looked and how much they enjoyed the party!!

Early Christmas with the Walkers & Fritts

We had Christmas with Andy's parents (Jimmy & MaryBeth) and sister's family (Cici, Logan, and Maddy) the Friday before Christmas because the Fritts family will be in Tennessee for Christmas.  Maddy had the most presents under the tree, but she was a tired little girl and rather unimpressed by her loot.  The rest of us were quite excited for her though! I was especially excited for Maddy with Cici's help to open her fleece tie blanket.  It swallows her now, but it gives her room to grow and explore.  (Cici, I hope that it stops shedding after you wash it; the lady at the fabric store said that it would.  I pre-washed the fabric, but didn't have time to wash and dry after making it - SORRY!)

Jimmy & MaryBeth gave Maddy many toys and clothes.  Here she is seriously studying one of her new dolls.  The princess doll has a little green frog attached; you can see one of its eyes right above her arm.  The ladies in the family have made sure that Maddy has plenty of TCU/frog clothing and toys to indoctrinate her from an early age.

One of the most memorable moments was watching Maddy play with a Tigger toy that Jimmy & MaryBeth gave her.  If you press Tigger's tail, he talks and vibrates.  At first she was not sure what to make of this toy, but she grabbed hold of his face to investigate this unknown thing more.  Maddy would grab hold of Tigger's nose, Cici would press Tigger's tail, and Maddy and Tigger would both vibrate.  Maddy quickly caught on to how to make the vibrating happen; she soon was grabbing Tigger's tail on her own.  She provided her own entertainment and unbeknownst to her, provided ours as well!

From The Prince to Middlemarch

As I've said in previous posts, I am working my way through a large stack of newly purchased books; they are supposedly great pieces of literature.  Last week I finished The Prince; it is written in an extremely straightforward manner.  The author is trying to clearly and concisely present his ideas and opinions.  While I struggle to write in this way, I appreciated his success.  The new book I've started is George Eliot's Middlemarch.  I have truly stepped into a different world; I expected this with respect to the subject matter, point of view, time period, and customs.  But I never considered how wordy the book might be!!  Don't get me wrong; I love a book that is vivid and descriptive, one that can transport me.  With this book, I find myself reading every word but only taking in every third, fourth, or fifth word.  This seems to be plenty for me to follow along with the story.  I am sure that this was done on purpose to demonstrate how life felt to those of the time, class, and society.  (I had a word just a moment ago that perfectly describes what I feel, but it flew right out of my head.)  The plot seems like it might be interesting, but I could have done with a 300 page book rather than 700+ pages.

Our week

You would think with no posts for several days that I had been up to something really interesting; sadly, that is not the case.  

I have been working on cleaning up the house although if you walked in the house you wouldn't know it!  I've been doing laundry, dishes, and picking up, but wouldn't you know that there are already more clothes and dishes to wash and stuff has already found its way out of "its place".  I'll continue to work on cleaning it so that we'll be ready for Christmas time.  We are hoping that we'll be able to see some of our friends, and I want to the house to be decent so that I won't do too much work (otherwise, I'll feel too anxious and exhausted to fully enjoy the time with our friends).  We are so excited to spend time with our friends because my illness and Andy's work and school have prevented much of our freedom.

Andy and I have been working on his graduate plan; on Thursday, he also met with several professors.  The plan was that he would graduate in 2013; I don't know about anyone else, but that seems like forever to us.  This spring he has to take the second part of a course, but there is also a "really cool" special topics class that his thesis adviser is teaching.  So, now Andy is going to take 2 classes this spring; life will be insane!!  If he can survive doubling this spring and one other semester, he'll finish in 2011.

Update on the kitty:  I took pity on him yesterday and took the cone off.  He was so happy to be free!  He promptly scratched, shook, and licked.  It's been fun watching him play - running and jumping.

We've also been working on our Italian a little more; right now we are mostly expanding our vocabulary.  There are a bunch of was to say "the" because it changes with singular, plural, masculine, and feminine nouns; we are trying to get our il, i, la, le, lo, l', and gli articles right.

I finished Machiavelli's The Prince.  It was really good to be reading this while working on Italian; I had lots of names to practice on.  I had also watched a documentary about the Medici family so I had a great history lesson that leads up to and includes the time in which Machiavelli was writing his book which was dedicated to a Medici.  It was also fascinating reading his ideas and examples of great rulers and lands.  It is true that he does take morality and ethics our of the equation a lot of the time.  I started thinking about some of his recommended methods like getting rid of your enemies, aka kill them.  He lived in a world where information wasn't as easily dispersed; if you kill all of your enemies and the witnesses of their deaths, who's to say that you are guilty of murder?  I think terror was used in a way than most of us can't imagine.  Now days, someone would have a camera phone, pictures would be posted on You Tube later that day, and there would be a world wide outcry on the next news broadcast.  Anyway, I simply read through the book, but I look forward to reading it again and taking notes on my thoughts.  I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it before, but you probably should have a fun, light book to read too.  One great thing about the book is that it is short, under 100 pages!

Second update on the kitty: He just got the cone put back on him because he started licking his wounds which aren't fully healed.  Unfortunately, he also wouldn't stop licking even when I told him no.

Hilarious Music Videos & Songs

Several months ago I was watching The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson and saw this band perform.  I loved them.  The band's name is Tally Hall, and I saw them perform Welcome to Tally Hall.  The next day I made Andy listen to them, but the only place that we could hear them was on YouTube while watching the music videos.  If you enjoy ironic, funky, weird, or anything unusual, check them out, especially Welcome to Tally Hall and Banana Man.  Go to their website, click on the Media tab, chick on the YouTube tab, then choose which video you want to watch.  I hope that you laugh as hard as we did!!

www.tallyhall.com

Several changes this year including finding A Fabulous Organization

     I am horrible at remembering to put some sort of introduction to these blogs.  I get so focused on what I'm going to write about that I just jump right in.  (So, I've already written the blog but remembered that I didn't put an intro.)  We've had many changes this year - I changed jobs; we moved; we got a cat; I got sick and am not working.  These have completely changed our lifestyle which has resulted in more changes.  These are some of them.

     We love Netflix!!!  Thank you Greg & Meg for telling me about some of the really interesting films y'all got from their lists.  Because of the recommendation, we decided to try the free trial.  We were so excited by the many movies that we could watch.  As we were both working crazy hours at the beginning of our membership, we didn't venture into our options too far due to time.  

    With our crazy life this year, we have searched the Netflix database much further and have found some real gems.  I will try to work on a list of ones we have been blown away by.  One of them is The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED.   As we are both nerds, I am sure most of you are not surprised that we were interested in watching a documentary with such a title.  I had never heard of TED, but the little blurb about the documentary sounded interesting.

    I was amazed by some of the talks given at a particular TED conference!  Some of the most brilliant people and some average people who have brilliant ideas and goals give talks and discuss these ideas with others like them.   These are not the kind of talks that you would hear in a college classroom; they are interesting, informative, entertaining, and some are inspiring.  Most of the speeches are about 20 minutes.  You can hear someone speak about anything you want.  If you are a teacher, some of these would be great for introductions into topics.

I know that I can't begin to convey my enjoyment, but if you ever have a few minutes, look at the website.  You can watch these short talks that conference attendees pay thousands of dollars to hear.  If you aren't sure where to start, look at the TED Prize winners.  The video isn't up yet for the 2009 winners so look at the 2008 or before winners.  They each speak about a wish for the world, animals, humans, etc., and the conference attendees work with the person to make it come true.  I was amazed by the work of 2006 TED Prize winners Dr. Larry Brilliant and Cameron Sinclair.

    Another great recommendation from Meg & Greg was Vonage.  It is a phone service provider that works through the internet.  We now pay about $20 a month for unlimited local and long distance and all of the "normal" phone features.  The biggest hassle is that when you are working on the internet and talking on the phone the conversation goes in and out as though someone was beeping in on the other line.  But really, it's not that hard to not work on the computer at the same time; it is more considerate to give your attention to the person with whom you are speaking.  For this slight "inconvenience" we get so much more for our money.

    That leads me to our newest household change.  Since I am at home most of every day with unlimited local and long distance at my disposal and Andy is at work where calling home is local, we rarely use our cell phones.  Our contract with Sprint ran out in November and Andy has been impatiently waiting for us to be able to use a different provider because he couldn't get any service while at work.

    Because we don't know exactly what is going to happen with my job, we are try to downsize so that we are living on Andy's salary alone.  So, I started researching cell plans that would allow us to be flexible about the number of minutes we used and would cost less.  Most of the 2 year contract plans had too many minutes, wasn't flexible enough, and cost too much.  We remembered that when we were in Greece we had all of these with the cell we bought for the trip.  This got us thinking about pre-paid and pay as you go cell phone plans.  I looked into Virgin Mobile, Boost, Tracfone, and several other options.  While some companies had slightly cheaper minutes, their phones seemed to be much more expensive.  So, we decided to go with Tracfone where you can get fairly cheap minutes (especially with Double Minutes) and inexpensive phones.  The inexpensive phones was quite important as Andy has been known to break things on accident; there is a reason he has been called a bull in a china closet.  So, we felt that it was important that we be able to replace a phone easily should anything happen.  One thing that we were really excited to find out when researching these phone options was that you can transfer your phone number to these phones--How awesome!!  I will say that the biggest hassle has been transfering by hand the phone numbers to our new cells; we couldn't change out SIM cards.

    If you've been following the blog, you can tell that we've been making some changes this year.  I'm sure that many of y'all have as well; we'd love to hear about any great finds whether simply interesting or money saving!

Merit of Moderation

Andy coined this phrase while we made homemade pizza for the first time.  We made my pizza (pepperoni, light cheese, light sauce); doesn't it look beautiful?! 

Then, we worked on Andy's pizza which had pepperoni, spinach, black olives, mushrooms, and onions on it.  As we put it together, I asked Andy if he wanted more sauce or cheese; he replied, "No, you've taught me the merit of moderation."  Once baked, he added Tabasco to this "moderate" pizza of his.  Unfortunately, we forgot to take a picture of his, but mine was prettier anyway...

For the crust, we used the dough from the homemade bread I've been making, the sauce recipe below with some basil added and garlic powder instead of real garlic which made a ton of leftover sauce, mozzarella cheese, and whatever toppings interest you.  Our biggest problem was making the crust thin enough.  Andy might have to learn the art of pizza tossing; Lord help us all!

http://video.about.com/italianfood/Pizza.htm

http://kittbo.blogspot.com/2008/02/different-kind-of-no-knead-bread.html

http://southernfood.about.com/od/pizzarecipes/r/bl40129i.htm

Behind the scenes of the Italian quest

Some of those who read the last post are asking "Why Italian?"  Yes, we know that Spanish would make a lot more sense living in Texas.  I've always liked Italian, and I've had enough of not making much progress learning Spanish.  I can read Spanish and sound pretty good but not really understand what I am reading.  Andy is able to comprehend Spanish much more.  So, imagine our surprise when we met some Italians in the Bahamas and I was the one who understood some of what they were saying while Andy was clueless.  Neither of us has ever learned any Italian, but you would think that Andy's ability in Spanish being much better than mine would help him to catch little bits of their conversations in Italian.  As you would expect, I was thrilled and shared/reminded/gloated about this.  So, I have hope that I might fare better with Italian than I did with Spanish.  I expect that Andy will progress faster than I will, but we look forward to the time when we know enough to actually have real conversations in Italian.  As I said before, hopefully, one day we might achieve a great grasp of the language; whether we do or not, I'm sure that we'll visit Italy one day, and anything we learn will be helpful.

Yogurt, Bread, Italian, Books, & How the teacher in me lives on

Since I have been feeling slightly better and able to accomplish a little more during the day, I have these kicks.... sooo, I've always had them, but now I'll be sharing them with people other than Andy.  Maybe sharing my thoughts, plans, and desires (aka kicks) will inspire me to follow through with them; if not inspire, at least keep me on track so that I don't feel embarrassed when people ask about the progress of the project.

Several of you already know about my homemaking kick.  I have learned to make yogurt and Greek yogurt from scratch.  I am able to add jelly to it, and it is like the store bought yogurt.  Andy really likes it, and I feel good about making and providing for my family.  The most recent success has been homemade artisan bread.  We'll see if the dough works when we try to make homemade pizza.

For several months, I've been thinking and talking about maybe learning Italian.  Everyone we've talked with has recommended Rosetta Stone.  However, it costs about $200-250 per level; if you buy all of the levels at once, it is about $500.  Well, I didn't really learn Spanish very well when I took three years of it in high school.  So, this seems like an exorbitant amount of money to spend on a program.  I mean I would love to be hopeful and say that I am going to become fluent, meaning I'll need all three levels, but who wants to spend that much money on a hope like that.  I was thrilled when I came across a BBC website (the one in our list of websites) that allows you to learn the basics of German, French, Italian, etc. for free.  There are 12 week courses for the languages, but you can work at your own speed.  So, now Andy and I are working through the Italian course in hopes of feeling better about the cost if we decide to invest in the Rosetta Stone course.

So, now that we've decided to try to learn some of the basics of Italian from the free website, I started a whiteboard with our vocabulary words...hehehe....as I said, the teacher in me lives on....it is even multi-colored.

More recently, I've also become interested in reading books that show up on those "Best 100 Books of all time" lists.  So, I went to Half Price Books the other day and picked up several of those books.  Currently, I am reading The Prince by Machiavelli - appropriate while learning Italian!  I can promise that we won't be learning Greek when I start reading The Iliad and The Odyssey!!!  We'll leave that language to my sister, Meg, and her family.

Happy Day

I made a 97 on my final.  My wife's good study habits continue to rub off on me ... when I listen to her.   Rock out.

I have triumphed!

Finally!!!  I have been wrestling with different sites all day attempting to have slideshows of our pictures here on the blog.  Every time I tried a new location, website, etc., there was some problem.  Most people probably would have given up or asked someone else. But I am not most people!  I kept telling myself that I would let it go; after all, I've been looking for hours.  The perfectionist, OCD, and competitive aspects of my personality couldn't let it go quite yet.  It just goes to show you that if you don't do much of anything else in a day you too can conquer this technology... well, one small aspect of it at least.  If anyone else would rather just ask and save some time, I'll be happy to share what I did!

Please make sure to scroll down so that you can ohh and ahh at my great accomplishment.  There are some beautiful pictures from Greece and the Bahamas; yes, I did just pat myself and Andy on our backs.

Our Poor Kitty

Our cat gets these weird little bumps on his tummy.  So, we took him to the vet, and they cut two of them off to biopsy them.  They've determined that they are from some allergy...thank the Lord.  So, he's had a couple of stitches that he didn't leave alone; all by himself, he has popped his stitches.  At least it saved us those vet costs.  But the vet had us put an e-collar on him.  When I picked him up from the vet, he already had it on.  Unfortunately for Cappuccino, he has to ride in his kennel while in the car.  Normally he fits just fine, but with this cone around his head, he struggled to turn around.  He vented his frustration by continuously bumping, rubbing, and trying to chew the kennel's door.

  

As I opened the top door, he seemed to say "Finally!"

 

 I lifted him out and set him on the floor.  Then, he slowly wandered all of the rooms bumping into corners, walls, and anything else in his way.

  

He is so pathetic and confused.  As I laugh at him, he looks up at me with his beautiful sky blue eyes that say "I don't understand what has happened; pleeeaaase take this thing off!!!"  The dog sniffed the cat as if asking "What did they do to you?!?"  

I of course then began laughing again.  The cat has finally decided that he needs to rest after all of these indignities.

Finals are coming

Oh boy, oh boy... finals are coming for my grad class.  So what am I doing, posting.  Yeah for procrastination.  My brain is swimming with cross products, Laplace transforms, and all that other stuff.  What fun... maybe Hulu.com has some obscure tv shows that I can watch before I hit the books again.   ~Andy

A New Beginning

So, after spending more time on the internet lately, I've been reading more blogs.  Then, at Thanksgiving, I found out that several family members already have blogs set up.  I truly felt as if I was lagging behind the technological times.  So, here we are on a Sunday evening, and I am attempting to join the masses.  Since we don't have any human children...and no, we are not the kind of pet owners who really think of and treat their animals as children...most of our posts will probably be about our pets and random thoughts.  For those of you who know Mary well, you're assuming that this blog will be almost entirely random, and you would be right.  As I, Mary, am writing this, you have some idea of what is in store.  Many of my posts will probably be disjointed and come from out of nowhere.  Andy on the other hand is a much better storyteller than I am; he will probably have the amusing posts.

We hope that you all enjoy a Window to the Walkers!