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.